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Copenhagen has been the capitol of Denmark since the 15th century and is the largest city in the country, with more than two million people living in the metropilitan area. It also is the governmental, economic and cultural center of the nation, and has a wide variety of museums, theaters and galleries. Despite its size,…

We’d enjoyed watching the electric ferries running back and forth from Helsingor, Denmark to Sweden and and decided it would be fun to take one and visit Helsingborg, SE for a day. We also were keen to watch the robotic arm that attaches the charging cable at each end. Helsingborg is the oldest city in…

Kronborg Castle at Helsingor, Denmark evolved from a 15th-century medieval fortress to a magnificent Renaissance castle. The Danish King Frederick II constructed the castle in the mid-1500s using funds gathered from the tolls that ships had to pay Denmark on passing through the Oresund. It was these tolls that prompted the Swedish to build the…

Denmark’s National Maritime Museum is built on the site of an old dry-dock in Helsingor. One of the stipulations of the design competition was that the museum be contained entirely in the dry-dock and not extend above street level. Where most designs proposed building the museum inside the dry-dock with a roof on top, the…

Frederiksborg Castle, a Dutch-Renaissance palace built in the early 1600s as a residence for Christian IV, is one of the most impressive buildings in Denmark with over 80 rooms full of paintings, tapestry, furniture and spectacular gilded decor. After a fire in 1859 destroyed much of the castle, Carlsberg brewery founder J. C. Jacobsen was…

The tiny island of Anholt is 7 miles (11 km) long and about 4 miles (6.4 km) wide and is 80% desert, making up the largest desert in Northern Europe. Just to the west is the 400-megawatt Anholt Offshore Wind Farm, the largest in Denmark and one of the largest wind farms in the world….

Laeso, a Danish island in the Kattegat, is famous for its seaweed houses that are found nowhere else in the world. Seaweed is an excellent insulator and the islanders began using it for roofing since Laeso became deforested by the 1600s. The seaweed roofs can last up to 400 years, but many are in a…

Denmark’s peninsula of Jutland is bordered on one side by the Skagerakk in the North Sea and on the other by the Kattegat in the Baltic Sea. At Grenen, a long spit off the northern tip of Jutland, you can walk out the end and stand with one foot in each body of water. Excellent…

Skagen, at the northern tip of Denmark, is the largest fishing port in the country and lands one quarter of the total Danish catch by value. It is the home port for the Ceton, the pelagic trawler that we toured in Donso, and one of the reasons we wanted to visit was to see some…

On our final day in Sweden, we returned to Smogen, this time anchoring off the east shore. With the North Sea directly to our west, and after watching the waves crashing into the shore there during the big westerly winds a couple of weeks earlier, it felt a little crazy to be anchored there. But…