48 Fun Facts About Copenhagen

Copenhagen sits mainly on which Danish island?

Zealand holds most of the city; the rest spills onto Amager, where a king settled Dutch farmers in 1521 to grow vegetables for the royal court.

Copenhagen's Danish name København originally meant what?

Merchants' harbour, Old Norse Kaupmannahǫfn: the town grew up as a trading post during the great Øresund herring fishery of the 11th century.

Which chemical element is named after Copenhagen's Latin name, honouring the city where it was discovered?

Hafnium, from Hafnia, was found at Niels Bohr's institute by Coster and de Hevesy, who searched zirconium ores to test the theory that element 72 was no rare earth.

Which bishop built a fortress on Slotsholmen in 1167, traditionally Copenhagen's founding?

Absalon built it, Saxo says, to fight piracy, but the Hanseatic League later captured the city and tore the castle down; its ruins survive beneath the palace on the islet.

Copenhagen became Denmark's capital around 1416 when which king moved his seat to Copenhagen Castle?

Eric of Pomerania also introduced the Sound Dues, a toll on ships through the Øresund that lasted over 400 years, yet he was deposed in all three union kingdoms.

Which city has the only Scandinavian university older than Copenhagen's?

Uppsala University opened in 1477, two years ahead; Copenhagen's own school was re-founded in 1537 after the Reformation to train priests for the new Lutheran church.

Which builder-king, reigning 1588-1648, gave Copenhagen its Renaissance summer palace and stock exchange?

Christian IV's building spree ended in hard times: his last war cost Denmark land and control of the Baltic, and he lost the sight of one eye in a sea battle.

Copenhagen's Round Tower, with its spiral ramp, was built as what?

An observatory: after Tycho Brahe lost royal favour and left Denmark, the king built it to succeed Brahe's island observatory, Stjerneborg.

Which ruler rode a horse up the Round Tower's spiral ramp in 1716?

The tower is part of the Trinitatis complex with a church and the university library.

Why does so little survive of medieval Copenhagen?

Two great fires, in 1728 and 1795, swept the old town; the first alone burned more than 1,400 houses and wiped out the university library.

Which admiral led the main British attack at the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801?

Horatio Nelson then negotiated with the heir to the throne, and Denmark suspended its membership of the League of Armed Neutrality.

The British bombardment of Copenhagen in September 1807 was notable for the deployment of what?

Congreve rockets helped set the city ablaze; after days of shelling Copenhagen surrendered and handed its fleet over to the British.

Copenhagen's 1947 Finger Plan directs the city's growth outward along what?

Commuter rail lines form five fingers reaching out from the centre's palm, while the green wedges between them are kept free of building for farming and leisure.

Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens, opened in 1843, helped inspire which famous theme park?

Disneyland: Walt Disney visited Tivoli while planning his California park, which opened in 1955, and was struck by how clean and orderly the Copenhagen garden was.

Tivoli's Rutschebanen, built in 1914 and still running, is one of the world's oldest what?

Rollercoaster: the wooden coaster still runs with a brakeman on board, who brakes on the descents so the train doesn't pick up too much speed.

The Little Mermaid statue was commissioned in 1909 by the son of which brewery's founder?

Carlsberg's heir fell for a ballet of the story, but the ballerina refused to pose nude, so the sculptor's wife posed for the body.

In 2010 the Little Mermaid statue made its first official trip away from Copenhagen, to which city?

Shanghai hosted Expo 2010, where the statue sat in Denmark's pavilion, while a video work by the dissident artist Ai Weiwei filled her empty rock back home.

Which author lived in three different houses on Nyhavn and is buried in Assistens Cemetery?

Hans Christian Andersen had his first fairy tales published while lodging at Nyhavn 20, and wrote The Tinderbox during his years by the canal.

Nyhavn, the canal dug in the 1670s up to Kongens Nytorv square, was built mainly for what?

Sea trade: trading houses along its quays unloaded goods straight from the vessels, and the waterfront later grew notorious for sailors' taverns.

Christiansborg Palace claims to be the only building housing what?

All three branches of a nation's government share it, and parliament first moved in after Denmark's 1849 constitution introduced constitutional monarchy.

The royal family moved into Amalienborg's four Rococo mansions after which event?

The Christiansborg fire of 1794 left the royal family homeless, so the king and crown prince each took a mansion, and a colonnade was built across the street to let them reach each other quickly.

Rosenborg Castle, built in 1606 as a royal summer residence, now houses what?

The Danish crown jewels are still worn: an 18th-century queen willed her jewellery to the crown rather than to an heir, so every reigning queen since has had them to wear.

Børsen, Copenhagen's old stock exchange, was famous for a spire, lost to fire in 2024, shaped like what?

Four dragons' intertwined tails crowned the exchange for nearly 400 years until the spire fell in the April 2024 fire, as people rushed in to carry artworks out of the burning building.

Freetown Christiania was established in September 1971 when squatters occupied what?

A former military barracks stood empty after the army left, so Christianshavn neighbours broke in to make a playground; soon after, squatters moved in and declared a free town.

Which Copenhagen street, closed to cars in 1962, became one of Europe's longest pedestrian shopping streets?

Strøget is a nickname, not an address: the car-free route is really a chain of differently named streets and squares running from City Hall Square to Kongens Nytorv.

Which Danish architect's studies of street life from the 1960s shaped Copenhagen's shift toward pedestrians and cyclists?

Jan Gehl spent decades counting how people actually use streets, and New York later hired him to help turn Broadway at Times Square from a traffic artery into space for people on foot.

The Øresund Bridge, opened in 2000, links Copenhagen with which Swedish city?

Malmö: the link's tunnel section was cast on shore in 20 giant pieces, towed out and sunk into a trench on the seabed, and the whole crossing still opened ahead of schedule.

Why does the Øresund crossing dive into a tunnel for its final stretch to Amager?

To keep flight paths clear: a high bridge beside Copenhagen Airport would have stood in the way of planes and big ships, so the link goes under, from an island built out of the seabed dug up for the tunnel.

The Copenhagen Metro, opened in 2002, is notable for being what?

Fully driverless doesn't mean unstaffed: a computer at the control centre drives the trains, while stewards ride along to look after safety and help passengers.

Which airline has its main hub at Copenhagen's Kastrup airport, the Nordic countries' busiest as of 2024?

SAS was born in 1946 when the national airlines of Denmark, Norway and Sweden teamed up to fly long-haul routes together, and the three merged fully five years later.

A Copenhagen brewery's 1901 gate tower rests on four granite statues of which animal?

Elephants carry the tower, each carved with a swastika: the brewery's trademark from 1881, it was later dropped to avoid any link with the Nazis, but the carvings are still there.

Which Copenhagen restaurant, opened in a waterfront warehouse in 2003, was ranked the world's best five times between 2010 and 2021?

Noma packs its creed into its name: 'nordisk' plus 'mad', Danish for Nordic food, the cuisine its kitchen set out to reinvent with local and foraged ingredients.

What is the traditional Danish open sandwich, a Copenhagen lunch staple built on buttered rye bread, called?

Smørrebrød comes with an etiquette: at a proper Danish lunch the herring and other fish toppings are eaten first, then the meats, and the cheese comes last.

Which two football clubs from the capital area contest Danish football's biggest rivalry?

FCK and Brøndby make it a young feud: FCK was only created in 1992, when two historic Copenhagen clubs pooled their professional sides to chase trophies.

FC Copenhagen play at which stadium in the Østerbro district?

Parken was built in 1990-92 on the site of the old national stadium, not by the city but by an insurance company; a sliding roof added in 2001 lets it double as a vast indoor arena.

Which Copenhagen festival, held in early June, began as a party crawl that moved to a different neighbourhood each day?

Copenhagen Distortion began in 1998 as a small party project and by 2000 was a five-day crawl of tiny, not-quite-legal gatherings; by 2011 a single street party was drawing some 100,000 people.

Which architect designed Copenhagen's Royal Hotel, opened in 1960, along with its furniture, lamps and tableware?

Arne Jacobsen created his Egg and Swan chairs for this hotel and designed everything down to the cutlery, yet almost all of his interior has since been stripped out and replaced.

The Copenhagen Opera House was paid for by a foundation chaired by which Danish business magnate?

Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller's family foundation had already given Copenhagen the Amalie Garden beside the royal palace; its opera house then went up straight across the water, on the same axis.

Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen dramatises a 1941 meeting between Bohr and which German physicist?

Werner Heisenberg's wartime visit was argued over so fiercely after the play that in 2002 Bohr's family released his private papers on the meeting, including a letter to Heisenberg he drafted but never sent.

Which disease killed at least a fifth of Copenhagen's inhabitants within six months in 1711?

Plague broke through in 1711 even though a quarantine station had been set up on the island of Saltholm in 1709 for ships from infected Baltic ports; estimates of the dead run from 12,000 to 25,000.

What did Denmark's slave trade do between Copenhagen's 1792 ban and its 1803 enforcement?

It grew sharply: the ten-year delay was meant to let Caribbean planters stock up, so the state offered cheap loans to buy enslaved Africans and shipments rose until the ban took effect.

Which Copenhagen district, designed by Nicolai Eigtved in Rococo style, contains Amalienborg and the Marble Church?

Frederiksstaden's founding in 1749 was tied to the Oldenburg kings' 300-year jubilee, and the king gave the four central plots free to nobles, who each had to build one of Amalienborg's matching mansions.

In 2014 Copenhagen Zoo drew worldwide protest by putting down a healthy two-year-old animal of which species?

Giraffe: the zoo said young Marius's genes were already common in Europe's breeding programme, so it turned down offers to rehome him, dissected him in front of visitors and fed the meat to its lions.

Which star-shaped 17th-century fortress near the Little Mermaid is still army property but open to everyone as a park?

Kastellet was built in the 1660s, just after the king took absolute power, as a safe base against his own subjects as well as foreign invaders: its guns could be turned on the city.

What did the Royal Danish Navy do in Copenhagen harbour in August 1943 as collaboration collapsed?

Scuttled several of its own ships: standing orders told crews to sink them or run for neutral Sweden if the Germans tried to seize the fleet, and only four warships got across.

Superkilen, a park furnished with swings from Iraq, benches from Brazil and a fountain from Morocco, lies in which Copenhagen district?

Nørrebro is one of Denmark's most mixed districts, so the park was planned as a world exhibition for locals from over 60 countries, who were asked to suggest objects from their home countries.

Ørsted Park and the Botanical Garden lie on which former part of Copenhagen?

The ramparts were dismantled in the later 1800s, and part of the ring was kept as parkland; the long lake in Ørsted Park is a stretch of the old moat.

Which philosopher is buried in Assistens Cemetery, the Copenhagen resting place of physicist Niels Bohr?

Søren Kierkegaard lies in a cemetery whose name means 'auxiliary': it opened in 1760 outside the city walls to take the overflow from Copenhagen's packed inner-city churchyards.