Copenhagen

A city that decided its harbour should be a swimming pool, and then did the plumbing.

Copenhagen's harbour was a working one for most of its life, which is a polite way of saying nobody swam in it. Shipyard runoff and sewage overflow kept it off-limits for decades, until years of rebuilt drainage changed that. The first harbour bath opened at Islands Brygge in 2003 — a wooden pontoon carrying five pools and a diving tower, with a lawn behind it for everyone waiting a turn — and it costs nothing to use. Samples go to the authorities daily. On the days the numbers come back wrong, a red flag goes up and nobody gets in.

That flag tells you most of what you need to know about the place. Almost everything worth your time here sits on that water, or a short ride from it.

The east side

Burmeister & Wain built ship engines on Refshaleøen until the yard folded in 1996, and the leftovers have been colonised rather than cleared. Reffen fills a stretch of the quay with kitchens built into shipping containers, but only from April to October; over winter the same ground becomes an ice rink, so a February visit expecting dinner will find skates instead. That seasonal flip is the thing most guides leave out, and it is the difference between a good evening and a wasted crossing.

Copenhagen Contemporary has the 7,000-square-metre former welding hall, which is one of the few rooms in Denmark big enough for art you walk around inside — Kengo Kuma's timber-and-brick structure occupies it from March 2026 until February 2027. La Banchina is the opposite scale: a wooden shack on a pier with a wood-fired sauna, a ladder down into the harbour and no bookings in summer.

Treat none of it as fixed. Reffen holds a time-limited lease and the whole island is queued for redevelopment; whether a cheap, unfinished Refshaleøen survives the polish is an open argument here.

Five minutes south, the Amager Bakke plant burns the city's household waste and pipes the heat into district heating. Bjarke Ingels' practice put a ski slope on the roof of it and a public park around that. You do not need skis: the stairs, the lift and a 450-metre planted trail are open during business hours and free, with gradients running between 5 and 35 per cent, and the plateau at 85 metres is the highest viewing point in the city. The slope is a plastic bristle surface rather than snow, so people are skiing it in August.

Keep going out along the coast and the beach starts. In 2005 the city sank a two-kilometre artificial island offshore and left a lagoon between it and the mainland, which is why 4.6 kilometres of sand here has water that stays flat and shallow whatever the Øresund is doing. The M2 metro stops at Amager Strand; on a bike it is about half an hour from the middle of town. At the northern end, Helgoland is a row of turquoise bathhouses up on stilts — members only for most of the year, open to everyone in summer.

Above ground and below it

In Christianshavn the spire of Vor Frelsers Kirke corkscrews 86 metres into the air, finished in 1752 and climbable ever since. There are 400 steps, and the last 150 of them are on the outside, winding round the cone and narrowing as they go while the handrail closes in. Book ahead, and expect it shut in rain or wind. The church underneath is free to walk into, and the carved elephants inside are a reference to Denmark's Order of the Elephant rather than to anything zoological.

A few streets away is Christiania, the self-governing quarter squatted into a disused barracks in 1971. It changed materially in April 2024: after four killings in three years, residents pulled up Pusher Street's cobblestones by hand, carted them off in wheelbarrows while the justice minister watched, and took them home as souvenirs. What remains is a walkable neighbourhood of self-built houses rather than the open drug market it had been known for.

For the reverse of a view, go under Søndermarken park in Frederiksberg. Cisternerne is a reservoir dug from 1856 that held sixteen million litres of the city's drinking water; drained, it has spent the decades since growing stalactites where lime leaches through the ceiling. One artist is commissioned to fill its 4,400 square metres each year, mid-March to the end of November. It is cold, it drips on you, and the dark is real dark.

Eating without going broke

Copenhagen is expensive and no trick makes it otherwise — a draught pint runs 50 to 75 kroner. There are two useful ways around it.

Torvehallerne is two glass halls on Israels Plads, three minutes' walk from Nørreport, where every metro line and the S-trains stop. That makes it the first proper food you can reach after getting off a train: around sixty stalls doing smørrebrød built to order, porridge at Grød, a fishmonger, coffee ground in front of you, with lunch landing somewhere between 75 and 145 kroner.

Cheaper, and better company, is fællesspisning — communal dinner. Absalon in Vesterbro is a red-brick church that the Flying Tiger founder Lennart Lajboschitz took over in 2014 and reopened the year after in colours no congregation would have permitted. Dinner is at six, every night of the week, at four long tables. Around two hundred people, one menu with a vegetarian option always available, and you sit where you are put rather than with the people you walked in with. Seventy-five kroner Sunday to Wednesday, a hundred at the weekend. Bingo or table tennis afterwards.

Worth the train

If you are carrying a rail pass, point it north. The E-line from København H reaches Humlebæk in about 35 minutes, and Louisiana is a ten-minute walk from the platform. The museum grew outward from a nineteenth-century villa as a chain of glass corridors stepping down a lawn toward the Øresund, with Giacometti's thin figures placed to face the windows rather than the room, and Calder and Lichtenstein out on the grass. It stays open until ten Tuesday to Friday, which makes it an evening as easily as a morning.

One last note: CopenPay runs from 22 June 2026 and trades free or discounted entry, coffee and bike hire at partner venues for things like arriving by train or joining a harbour clean-up. If you got here by rail, you have already qualified.