Holiday Articles & Guides to top European destinations
Exploring Denmark.
Why choose Denmark for a summer holiday? While everyone else you know is sweating through Italian piazzas or fighting for towel space on the Costa del Sol, you could be cycling along flat coastal paths with a breeze that actually cools you down, stopping every now and then because you spotted a bakery that smells too good to ignore. Denmark does not shout for your attention. It sort of waves you over, offers you a seat, and passes you a cold beer. And honestly? That is exactly the point. The country is small enough that you never feel like you are travelling vast distances, yet varied enough that a week here can feel like several different holidays stitched together. You get city energy, coastal calm, and moments of proper wilderness, sometimes all in the same afternoon.
Copenhagen tends to be where these trips start, and the city knows how to make a first impression without trying too hard. Nyhavn is the postcard everyone expects, all candy-coloured townhouses and boats bobbing in the canal, but the real fun starts when you wander off into neighbourhoods like Vesterbro or Nørrebro. This is where the locals actually live, and where you will find the kind of cafes that look like someone’s living room, except the coffee is better and the pastries are dangerously addictive. You can spend a morning in Assistens Cemetery, which sounds morbid until you realise it is basically a beautiful park where people picnic near Hans Christian Andersen’s grave. The Torvehallerne food market is another easy place to lose time, wandering between stalls selling everything from smørrebrød to artisanal chocolates, pretending you have the appetite of a Viking. The accommodation in the capital ranges from sleek harbour-front hotels to quirky Airbnb flats in converted warehouses. If you are feeling flush, a room at somewhere like Hotel Sanders or Nimb will have you pretending you are a Danish design mogul for a few nights. If not, the city is full of clean, friendly hostels and mid-range spots that still manage to look like they belong in a magazine spread. Copenhagen is that rare capital where you can feel the pulse of a vibrant city without ever feeling crushed by it.
A short train ride north brings you to the coast of North Zealand, which feels like Copenhagen’s sophisticated weekend retreat. Towns like Helsingør sit there with Kronborg Castle looming over the water, and yes, that is Hamlet’s Elsinore, though Shakespeare never actually visited and the Danes find this amusing. The beaches here are not the dramatic cliff affairs you get in Cornwall or Portugal. They are soft, sandy, and often backed by whispering pine forests that smell like resin and salt. You can rent a classic Danish summerhouse in this area, which is an experience in itself. These places are usually painted that particular mustard yellow or deep rust red, with white trim and a garden that someone clearly loves more than is strictly necessary. Inside, expect wood-burning stoves, shelves of well-thumbed paperbacks in Danish, and candles. So many candles. The whole thing is designed around hygge, that untranslatable word that basically means making ordinary moments feel warm and special. You will find yourself sitting by a window with a cup of tea, watching the light change over the Øresund, and wondering why your life back home does not involve this much candlelight. It is a gentle, unhurried kind of coastal living that makes you seriously consider cancelling your return flight.
Then there is Aarhus, which locals will tell you is the cooler younger sibling to Copenhagen. It is Denmark’s second city, tucked on the east coast of Jutland, and it has an energy that feels slightly more experimental and a little less concerned with what the rest of the world thinks. The ARoS Art Museum is the obvious draw, with that rainbow panorama walkway on top that makes you feel like you are walking through a light spectrum. But the Latin Quarter below is where you want to lose an afternoon, weaving between cobblestones and independent shops selling things you did not know you needed. Aarhus has a proper seaside vibe too, with beaches like Bellevue just a quick bus ride away, where the water is calm and the sand is clean and families set up for the day with elaborate picnic setups that put your supermarket sandwich to shame. Staying here often means boutique hotels in converted docklands buildings or smart apartments near the harbour. The city manages to feel vibrant without being exhausting, which is a rare trick. You can have dinner at a buzzing restaurant along the Aarhus River, watch the kayakers drift by, and still be back in a quiet room with a view of the bay before ten, feeling like you have done plenty but not too much.
For something completely different, you head north to Skagen, right at the very tip of Jutland, where the country seems to run out of land and patience with the rest of Europe. This is where the North Sea and the Baltic Sea meet, and you can stand with a foot in each, watching the waves collide in a line of foam that feels like a minor geographical miracle. It is one of those places that feels properly remote even though there are other people around, all of them also looking slightly awestruck. The light here has drawn artists for over a century, and walking through the sand dunes at Grenen, you start to understand why they kept coming back. The town itself is a cluster of yellow houses with red roofs, little galleries, and fish restaurants that serve plaice so fresh it was probably swimming that morning. Accommodation in Skagen is all about location. There are classic seaside hotels with creaky floorboards and excellent breakfasts, or you can rent a cabin out among the dunes where the only sound at night is the wind and the distant foghorn. It is the sort of place where you plan to stay two nights and end up staying four because leaving feels like a bad decision. You wake up early just to watch the fishermen prepare their boats, and you realise that remote does not have to mean lonely. Sometimes it just means you have finally found room to breathe.
If Skagen feels like the edge of Denmark, Bornholm is Denmark trying to see if it can be an island in the Baltic and get away with it. This little rock sits out in the sea closer to Sweden than to Copenhagen, and it has a personality all its own. The coastline here is more dramatic than the mainland, with rocky cliffs at Helligdomsklipperne and sandy coves that feel secret even when they are not. The island is famous for smoked fish, particularly herring, and there is something deeply satisfying about eating something that was caught locally, smoked over alder wood in a little shed by the harbour, and served to you on rye bread with a cold snaps. Bornholm has a wonderful mix of accommodation. You can camp in the pine forests, which is very Danish and very pleasant, or you can book into one of the old fishing villages like Gudhjem or Svaneke, where guesthouses cling to the hillsides and every window seems to frame the sea. Cycling around the island is almost mandatory, partly because the trails are excellent and partly because it gives you an excuse to stop for another ice cream every few miles. In the evenings, when the day-trippers have gone and the ferries have stopped for the night, Bornholm slows down to a pace that feels almost meditative. You sit on a rock, watch the sun drop into the Baltic, and realise that doing absolutely nothing is sometimes the entire point of a holiday.
For a different flavour of quiet, there is Ribe down in the south west. This is Denmark’s oldest town, and it wears its age lightly. The streets are cobbled and crooked, the cathedral dominates the skyline, and there is a sense that not much has changed in a few hundred years, apart from the cars parked awkwardly along the edges. Ribe is not coastal in the beach-holiday sense, but it sits near the Wadden Sea, that vast tidal marshland that stretches up towards the Netherlands. It is a landscape of mudflats and migratory birds and enormous skies that seem to go on forever. Staying in Ribe usually means small inns or bed and breakfasts in half-timbered houses where the ceilings are low and the breakfasts are enormous. There is no nightlife to speak of, unless you count the night watchman who still does his rounds in the evenings, singing traditional songs and telling stories that half the town pretends not to listen to but secretly loves. It is wonderfully, gloriously remote in a way that makes you check your phone less and look up more. You find yourself noticing the sound of church bells and the way the light hits the old merchants' houses in the late afternoon, and you wonder why you normally fill every silence with noise.
The thing about a Danish holiday is that the accommodation is rarely just a place to sleep. Even the most basic cabin or campsite seems designed to make you feel like you are part of the landscape rather than just observing it. Danish design sensibilities run deep, so even functional spaces tend to have good light, clean lines, and a sense that someone cared about how you would feel when you woke up there. Whether you are in a luxury hotel in Copenhagen or a tent on Bornholm, there is an underlying philosophy that your surroundings should help you relax. And they do, often more than you expect.
What stays with you afterwards is not a checklist of famous sights seen, though you will see plenty. It is the feeling of having slowed down without quite meaning to. It is the memory of cycling through flat green countryside with the smell of the sea never far away, of stopping for a soft ice cream that is somehow better than ice cream has any right to be, of chatting to a local who speaks better English than you do and is modestly apologetic about it. It is the realisation that a holiday does not need to be hot, or crowded, or frantic to be perfect. Denmark offers you space, and good bread, and the time to actually notice where you are. That is a pretty good deal, if you ask me.
