--- title: "Denmark travel guide: Copenhagen and Jutland | Wimup" description: "Denmark: where to base yourself across Zealand, Funen and Jutland, how far the trains go, when the light is worth planning around, and what to eat." url: https://wimup.com/country/denmark type: Country guide updated: 2026-11-01 publisher: Wimup (https://wimup.com) --- # Denmark, short distances and long light **Six million people** on one peninsula and **roughly 400 islands**, with no point in the country far from salt water. Denmark is small enough that the whole map is one itinerary, and flat enough that the bicycle is the honest way to see most of it. ## Quick answer Start in **Copenhagen**. Roskilde, Helsingør and the north Zealand coast are all inside an hour of it by train. Give the second half of the week to **Jutland**, with **Aarhus** as the base and Ribe, the Wadden Sea or Skagen as the reason to keep going. **Bornholm** is a trip of its own, not a day out, and **Funen** is the easy middle, best taken slowly on a bike. ## Quick facts - **Best months:** May–Jun · Sep - **Ideal length:** 6–9 days - **Budget per day:** $130–210 - **Language:** Danish, with English almost everywhere - **Getting around:** Trains, bikes and a few ferries - **4** City guides - **6,032,963** People - **9** UNESCO sites - **7,314 km** Coastline Denmark comes in three pieces and the trip gets easier once you can name them. Zealand is the eastern island, and it holds Copenhagen, the airport, the Øresund crossing to Sweden, Roskilde with its royal cathedral and Viking ships, and Kronborg at Helsingør looking across the narrowest water to the Swedish coast. Funen sits in the middle, reached from Zealand over the Great Belt Fixed Link, with Odense at its centre and a coastline of small manor towns and islands south of it. Jutland is the peninsula joined to Germany, and it is the half most first trips skip and second trips are built around: Aarhus a third of the way up, Aalborg beyond it, the Wadden Sea and Ribe on the west coast, and the sandbar at Skagen where the country simply stops. Copenhagen is the obvious base and a legitimate one, because the train network fans out from it and the country is short. Aarhus is about three hours away by rail, Odense a little over an hour, and the airport is a fifteen-minute ride from the central station rather than an expedition. What that compresses is the decision most countries force: you do not have to choose between the capital and the rest, because a day trip here reaches a UNESCO cathedral, a Viking ring fortress or a chalk cliff and still gets you back for dinner. Where the country rewards a second base is the west and the north. Jutland changes the weather and the pace at once. The North Sea coast is dunes, bunkers and wind, Ribe is the oldest town in the country and reads like it, and the Wadden Sea is a tidal landscape that empties and refills twice a day and carries its own UNESCO listing. Skagen at the top is where the Skagerrak and the Kattegat meet in a visible line off Grenen, and it is where the Danish painters went in the 1880s for the light, which is still the reason to go in June. Bornholm is the outlier and the one island worth planning around: it lies in the Baltic closer to Sweden than to Copenhagen, reached by a fast ferry from Ystad, and it holds the round churches, the smokehouses and a coast of granite rather than sand. Three practical things shape any itinerary. The country is cyclable in a way few others are, with signed national routes, bikes carried on most trains and a capital where a bike lane is a road rather than a stripe of paint. The currency is the krone and not the euro, though cards work everywhere and cash is close to unnecessary. And the light is the real seasonal variable rather than the temperature: midsummer evenings stay usable until eleven, and in December the day is short enough that the plan should be indoors, warm and early. ## 4 Denmark city guides 1. [Aarhus](https://wimup.com/city/aarhus.md): Denmark · 10 picks 2. [Odense](https://wimup.com/city/odense.md): Denmark · 10 picks 3. [Aalborg](https://wimup.com/city/aalborg.md): Denmark · 10 picks 4. [Skagen](https://wimup.com/city/skagen.md): Denmark · 10 picks ## Know before you go - **Population:** 6,032,963 - **Area:** 43,094 km² - **Density:** 140 / km² - **Capital:** Copenhagen - **Major cities:** Copenhagen, Aarhus, Odense, Aalborg, Esbjerg - **Tourism board:** Official site - **Entry:** Schengen, with the EU Entry/Exit System now live Denmark is in Schengen, with 90 days in any 180 for visa-free visitors. Biometric Entry/Exit checks have run at external borders since 10 April 2026, so arrival is slower. ETIAS is not yet required. - **Currency:** Danish krone (DKK), and almost no cash Denmark kept the krone in a referendum in 2000 and pegs it to the euro, which is not legal tender. Cards and phones work everywhere, buses and bakeries included. At a terminal, pay in kroner. - **Language:** Danish, and English almost universally Nearly everyone under sixty speaks good English, and nobody expects a visitor to attempt Danish pronunciation. Learn two words anyway. Tak covers thank you and please, and hej is hello and goodbye. - **Calling code:** +45, with no area codes - **Power:** Type K sockets, 230 V, 50 Hz The Danish socket adds a third hole below the two pins. Round two-pin European plugs fit and work. German-style plugs with side clips do not earth properly and need an adapter. - **Emergency:** 112 for emergencies, 114 for non-urgent police - **Healthcare:** Free emergency care, and a phone line before the hospital Acute care in a public hospital is free, and EU and EEA visitors carry the European Health Insurance Card for the rest. In the Capital Region, call 1813 before going to an emergency room. - **Getting around:** Trains for the length of it, bikes for the width DSB runs the main lines. Copenhagen to Odense takes a little over an hour, Copenhagen to Aarhus about three. Bikes ride most trains for a small supplement. Buy tickets in the DSB app. - **Cycling:** Bikes are traffic, not recreation City bike lanes are separated from the road and run at commuting speed. Signal with your arm, stop at red, keep right, and never walk in one. National cycle routes are signposted end to end. - **Tipping:** Included, and rounding up is plenty Service is in the price by law and staff earn a full wage. Rounding up a restaurant bill, or leaving the coins from a taxi fare, reads as a compliment. Nobody will chase you for it. - **Alcohol:** 16 in a shop, 18 in a bar Shops sell beer and wine at 16. Spirits and anything above 16.5 per cent need 18, as do bars. Drinking in parks and on harbourfronts is legal. Drink-driving limits are strict and enforced. - **Time and daylight:** CET, and the light is the real season Central European Time, with summer time from late March to late October. June gives about seventeen hours of light, usable until eleven at night. December gives about seven. Plan it indoors. - **Bornholm:** Closer to Sweden than to Copenhagen Take a train across Sweden to Ystad and a fast ferry, or fly from Copenhagen. Give the island its own nights and a bike. The coast road is the trip, and the smokehouses are spread along it. ## When to visit - **Jan**: Short, grey days and the lowest prices of the year. Museums, swimming halls and long lunches - **Feb**: Winter bathing at its most Danish, and the first real return of afternoon light - **Mar**: Cold and bright, with the outdoor tables coming out optimistically early - **Apr** (good): Anemones in the beech woods, Easter lunches, and a coast that is still bare and windswept - **May** (best): The best-value month: beech leaves out, long evenings, everything open and nobody there yet - **Jun** (best): The longest light of the year and Sankt Hans bonfires on 23 June. The sea is still cold - **Jul** (peak): Peak: Danish school holidays, the festival calendar at full volume and every summer house let - **Aug** (best): The warmest sea of the year, and the crowds thinning once the schools go back mid-month - **Sep** (best): Quiet, golden and the best cycling month, with festivals rather than tourists in the cities - **Oct** (good): Autumn holidays in week 42 fill the family attractions, and Culture Night opens Copenhagen after dark - **Nov**: The darkest turn of the year, and the month the whole hygge habit exists for - **Dec** (good): Christmas markets, Tivoli lit from mid-November, and about seven hours of daylight to work with ## Fun fact Bakken, in the deer park north of Copenhagen, has run since 1583, the oldest operating amusement park in the world. Tivoli, in the centre of the capital, opened in 1843 and is the second, half an hour away on the same train line. Walt Disney visited Tivoli often before Disneyland opened in 1955. ## Stereotypes, sorted out - **Myth:** Denmark is Copenhagen with countryside attached **Reality:** Jutland holds more than half the population and two of the four largest cities. Aarhus has the university, the art museum with the rainbow walkway on its roof and a food scene that answers to nobody in the capital, and the North Sea coast an hour west of it behaves like a different country. - **Myth:** Hygge is a marketing invention **Reality:** The word is old, ordinary and closer to "cosy" than to a philosophy. What is real is the behaviour under it: candles on café tables at four in the afternoon in November, and dinners that run long because nobody is going anywhere. The exported version with the branded blankets is the invention. - **Myth:** It rains all the time **Reality:** Rain arrives as showers under a moving sky and seldom settles in for the day. Daylight shapes a trip more. It runs to about seventeen hours in June and about seven in December. - **Myth:** Everyone cycles because the country is flat **Reality:** Flat helps. The infrastructure is the reason. Copenhagen counts close to half of all trips to work and study as bike trips, on separated lanes with their own signals and their own rush hour, and among people who live in the city the share is higher still. - **Myth:** Danish food is pickled herring and little else **Reality:** Herring is real and worth ordering. It is also the starting point of a lunch table that runs through smørrebrød, roast pork and cheese, and the country that wrote the New Nordic manifesto in 2004 now has a bakery culture and a produce culture to match the tasting menus. - Janteloven, the Law of Jante, is the shorthand Danes use for a real instinct: do not present yourself as better than the group. It reads as understatement in conversation and as a flat, first-name tone in offices. - Tipping is not expected. Service is in the price, and rounding up a bill is a compliment, never an obligation. - Never stand or walk in a bike lane. It is a road, it moves faster than it looks, and stepping into one while leaving a bus is the classic visitor mistake. - Dinner is early. Kitchens fill from six and many stop serving by nine or ten outside the biggest cities. Book a late table. - Cards and phones cover almost everything, and Danes settle debts between themselves with MobilePay. Cash is rare enough that some places no longer take it at all. - Shoes come off inside a Danish home unless the host says otherwise. - Sankt Hans on 23 June is not a public holiday. It is a bonfire on a beach with singing, and the most Danish evening of the year to be invited to. ## Famous Danish faces - **Hans Christian Andersen**: Wrote the fairy tales the rest of the world grew up on, and was born in Odense in 1805 - **Søren Kierkegaard**: Philosopher of anxiety and choice, buried in Assistens Cemetery in Copenhagen - **Karen Blixen**: Wrote Out of Africa as Isak Dinesen, from the house at Rungstedlund that is now her museum - **Niels Bohr**: Physics Nobel in 1922. Founded the Copenhagen institute that carries his name - **Mads Mikkelsen**: The country’s most exported actor, from Pusher and The Hunt to Another Round - **Jørn Utzon**: Designed the Sydney Opera House and won the Pritzker Prize for it in 2003 - **Arne Jacobsen**: Designed the Egg and Swan chairs, and the Copenhagen hotel they were made for - **Carl Nielsen**: Composer of six symphonies, born into a poor family on Funen in 1865 - **Tove Ditlevsen**: Poet and memoirist. Her Copenhagen Trilogy went global decades after her death - **Peter Høeg**: Novelist, best known abroad for Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow - **Tycho Brahe**: Astronomer whose observations from the island of Hven made Kepler’s laws possible - **Ole Rømer**: Made the first quantitative measurement of the speed of light, in 1676 - **Hans Christian Ørsted**: Discovered electromagnetism in 1820. The unit of magnetic field strength bears his name - **Knud Rasmussen**: Explorer and ethnographer who crossed the Arctic by dog sled on the Thule expeditions - **Bjarke Ingels**: Architect behind BIG and CopenHill, the waste-to-energy plant with a ski slope on top - **Hans J. Wegner**: Designed hundreds of chairs. The Wishbone is in every second Danish dining room - **Poul Henningsen**: Designed the PH lamps, built to spread light without a single glare point - **Verner Panton**: Took Danish design into colour and plastic with the cantilevered Panton chair - **Lars von Trier**: Co-wrote the Dogme 95 manifesto and won the Palme d’Or with Dancer in the Dark - **Susanne Bier**: Director whose In a Better World won the 2011 foreign language Oscar - **Sofie Gråbøl**: Played Sarah Lund in The Killing, and sold Nordic noir (and one jumper) to the world - **Nikolaj Coster-Waldau**: Jaime Lannister in Game of Thrones, and a fixture of Danish film before it - **Lars Ulrich**: Drummer and co-founder of Metallica, raised in Gentofte north of Copenhagen - **MØ**: Singer and songwriter, and the voice on one of the most-streamed pop songs of the 2010s - **Agnes Obel**: Pianist and songwriter whose spare, layered records made her a European festival fixture - **Jonas Vingegaard**: Won the Tour de France in 2022 and again in 2023 - **Caroline Wozniacki**: Former world number one in tennis, and the 2018 Australian Open champion - **Peter Schmeichel**: Goalkeeper of the side called up from its summer holiday to win Euro 92 - **Christian Eriksen**: Midfielder for the national team, Ajax, Tottenham and Manchester United - **Frederik X**: King of Denmark since January 2024, and a former frogman in the naval special forces - **Margrethe II**: Queen from 1972 until she abdicated in 2024. Also an illustrator and set designer - **Anders Fogh Rasmussen**: Prime minister from 2001 to 2009, then Secretary General of NATO until 2014 - **René Redzepi**: Chef who built Noma in Copenhagen and made foraging a restaurant discipline - **Claus Meyer**: Co-wrote the New Nordic Kitchen Manifesto in 2004, then built it into an industry ## Must-try Danish food - **Stegt flæsk med persillesovs**: Fried pork belly, boiled potatoes and parsley sauce. Voted the national dish in 2014. - **Smørrebrød**: Open rye sandwiches built in a fixed order, eaten with a knife and fork, never stacked. - **Frikadeller**: Pan-fried pork and veal meatballs, the weeknight dinner of the whole country. - **Flæskesteg**: Roast pork with crackling. The Christmas centrepiece, and a smørrebrød topping all year. - **Hakkebøf med bløde løg**: A beef patty under a heap of soft onions, with pickled beetroot and a fried egg on top. - **Rugbrød**: Dense sour rye, the base of nearly everything on this list, sold in every supermarket. - **Tarteletter**: Puff pastry cases of chicken and asparagus in white sauce. A family-lunch starter. - **Stegt rødspætte**: Fried plaice with remoulade and lemon, best on the Limfjord and the North Sea coast. - **Marinerede sild**: Pickled herring, plain or in curry cream, and the first plate at any proper lunch table. - **Sol over Gudhjem**: Bornholm smoked herring on rye with a raw egg yolk, named after its fishing town. - **Fiskefrikadeller**: Fish cakes, the everyday cousin of the pork ones, usually with remoulade. - **Wienerbrød**: What the world calls a Danish. Danes say Viennese bread, after the bakers who brought it. - **Kanelsnegl**: The cinnamon snail, standard mid-morning currency in every bakery queue. - **Æbleskiver**: Spherical pancakes from a dimpled iron pan, eaten in December with jam and icing sugar. - **Risalamande**: Christmas rice pudding with almonds, hot cherry sauce and one whole almond to find. - **Rødgrød med fløde**: Summer berry compote with cream, and the pronunciation test every visitor gets. - **Drømmekage**: Dream cake from Jutland: sponge under a caramelised coconut topping, cut into squares. - **Ristet hotdog**: The roasted pølsevogn hot dog, with remoulade, crisp onions and pickled cucumber. - **Flæskestegssandwich**: Roast pork, crackling and red cabbage in a soft bun, from the same wagons. - **Pølsehorn**: A sausage in pastry, at every Danish child's birthday and every football match. - **Akvavit**: Caraway spirit, drunk ice cold with herring and chased with beer. - **Gløgg**: Mulled wine with almonds and raisins, from the first week of December until Christmas. - **Danish pilsner**: Carlsberg and Tuborg first, then the microbreweries that make beer worth an evening. ## By theme - [Cherry blossom in Europe](https://wimup.com/cherry-blossom-europe.md) - [Family holidays](https://wimup.com/family-travel.md) ## FAQs ### How many days do you need in Denmark? Six to nine. Three or four cover Copenhagen properly and leave room for one day trip, to Roskilde, Helsingør or the coast north of the city. Spend the rest crossing to Jutland. Bornholm needs three days of its own on top. ### When is the best time to visit Denmark? May, June and September. The beech woods come out in May, the light in June runs to about seventeen hours, and September holds the warmth without the school holidays. July is the country on its own holiday: warm sea, full summer houses and the festival calendar at its busiest. ### Is Denmark expensive? Yes, by most standards, and it shows most in restaurants, alcohol and taxis. The counterweights are real: tap water is excellent everywhere, the bike replaces most transport, museums are cheaper than their equivalents in London or Paris, and a bakery lunch with rye bread and herring costs a fraction of a restaurant one. ### Do you need a car in Denmark? Not for Copenhagen, Zealand, Odense or Aarhus, where trains and bikes cover everything and parking is the only thing a car adds. A car earns itself on the west coast of Jutland, around the Wadden Sea and out towards Skagen, where the distances between the good stops are longer than the bus timetable likes. ### Does Denmark use the euro? No. The currency is the Danish krone, held in a narrow band against the euro, and the country voted to keep it in a referendum in 2000. In practice you will barely handle either one: cards and phones are accepted almost everywhere, including on buses and at museum desks. ## Related countries - [Italy](https://wimup.com/country/italy.md) - [France](https://wimup.com/country/france.md) - [All of Europe](https://wimup.com/europe) Part of [Europe](https://wimup.com/europe.md) ## Sources - [Tourism board](https://www.visitdenmark.com/?utm_source=wimup.com&utm_medium=referral) - [Entry](https://www.nyidanmark.dk/en-GB?utm_source=wimup.com&utm_medium=referral) - [Currency](https://www.nationalbanken.dk/en?utm_source=wimup.com&utm_medium=referral) - [Getting around](https://www.dsb.dk/en/?utm_source=wimup.com&utm_medium=referral) - [Cycling](https://www.visitdenmark.com/denmark/things-do/cycling/cycle-denmark?utm_source=wimup.com&utm_medium=referral) - [Bornholm](https://www.visitdenmark.com/denmark/destinations/bornholm?utm_source=wimup.com&utm_medium=referral) - Rankings are Wimup editorial picks. Prices, durations and budgets are editorial estimates, not live quotes; check the official site before you go.