Travel Guide: Copenhagen / Scandinavian Capital of Design
The smartest restaurants, sophisticated museums, and best hotels
To an outside visitor, the Scandinavian countries – Denmark, Norway, and Sweden – might seem quite similar. The languages sound pretty much the same, and their history has often been intertwined, making contemporary culture appear very much the same to those not sensitive to details.
The Kalmar Union (1397–1523) joined for hundreds of years the three kingdoms under a single monarch. Following the end of the union, Norway and Denmark entered a union that didn’t end until 1814.
Today, the Greater Copenhagen Region consists of Eastern Denmark and large parts of Southern Sweden, making it an international and culturally diverse area. This is also the place where I grew up. For the first twenty years of my life, I lived in a town approximately an hour north of Copenhagen, on the Swedish coast but only twenty minutes by ferry from Denmark. As for most people who grow up close to a larger city, Copenhagen seemed to have a magnetic pull. We would go there for theatre plays and museum vi…