The Most Beautiful Places in Denmark
18 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Denmark are Tivoli Gardens, Møns Klint and Frederiksborg Palace. The list covers 18 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Denmark is low country with no mountains at all, and its beauty lies where land meets sea and where the crown chose to build. Ice-age glaciers left a soft landscape of moraine and islands, ringed by thousands of kilometres of coast; in a few places the sea has cut into it, exposing ancient chalk or piling up wandering dunes. On top of that sits one of the oldest monarchies in Europe, whose Renaissance kings, Christian IV above all, filled Zealand with palaces and fortified churches in brick and sandstone.
Møns Klint shows the geology plainly: white chalk cliffs rising more than a hundred metres above the Baltic, made of the shells of Cretaceous plankton and pushed up by glacial ice. At the other end of the country, near Skagen, the Sand-Covered Church is reduced to a whitewashed tower standing out of the dunes that swallowed its nave. Frederiksborg Palace spreads across three islets in a lake at Hillerød, while Egeskov on Funen rises straight out of its moat, a Renaissance castle built on oak piles.
Kronborg at Helsingør guards the narrow Øresund and is Shakespeare's Elsinore. Roskilde Cathedral, an early brick Gothic church, is the burial place of Danish monarchs. Copenhagen adds its own variety: Grundtvig's Church with a yellow-brick facade shaped like organ pipes, the Church of Our Saviour with a staircase spiralling around the outside of its spire, the painted gables of Nyhavn and Tivoli Gardens, open since 1843.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tivoli Gardens | Amusement park | |
| 2 | Møns Klint | Cliff | ✓ |
| 3 | Frederiksborg Palace | Palace | |
| 4 | Roskilde Cathedral | Cathedral | ✓ |
| 5 | Nyhavn | Canal | |
| 6 | Egeskov Castle | Castle | |
| 7 | Grundtvig's Church | Church building | |
| 8 | Kronborg Castle | Castle | ✓ |
| 9 | The Sand-Covered Church | Church building | |
| 10 | Louisiana Museum of Modern Art | Museum | |
| 11 | Church of Our Saviour | Church building | |
| 12 | Kastellet | Star fort | |
| 13 | Hammershus | Castle | |
| 14 | Rubjerg Knude and Lighthouse | Dune | |
| 15 | Råbjerg Mile | Dune | |
| 16 | Den Blå Planet, Copenhagen | Public aquarium | |
| 17 | Østerlars Church | Fortified church | |
| 18 | Skovtårnet | Observation tower |
01 Tivoli Gardens
Tivoli
Denmark · 0.9 km from Copenhagen55.674° N 12.568° E
Image by nozurbina from Pixabay Tivoli Gardens opened in the middle of Copenhagen on 15 August 1843, which makes it the second-oldest amusement park still operating anywhere. Its founder, Georg Carstensen, won royal permission from King Christian VIII by arguing, so the story goes, that people busy enjoying themselves have little time for politics.
Did you know? Composer Hans Christian Lumbye, inspired by the Viennese waltz composers, led Tivoli's music from 1843 to 1872 and became known as the Strauss of the North.
02 Møns Klint
Denmark54.964° N 12.552° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
kallerna · CC BY-SA 4.0 Møns Klint is a wall of white chalk cliffs along the eastern shore of the island of Møn, rising out of the Baltic in a line some six to seven kilometres long.
Did you know? Besides Dronningestolen, the cliff is divided into named sections such as Gråryg at about 108 metres and Store Taler at about 100 metres.
03 Frederiksborg Palace
Denmark · 1 km from Hillerød55.935° N 12.301° E
Original uploader was Kresten Hartvig Klit at da.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 2.5 Frederiksborg rises straight out of its lake in Hillerød, north of Copenhagen, spread across three small islands: red brick, sandstone trim, spires and a skyline of stepped and scrolled gables. It is the grandest building of Christian IV, the king who remade Denmark's architecture in the early 17th century.
Did you know? Frederick II's earlier castle here was the first Danish castle built inland and for pleasure rather than defence, and the King's Way to Copenhagen was built for it.
04 Roskilde Cathedral
Roskilde Domkirke
Denmark · 0.8 km from Roskilde55.643° N 12.080° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Kurt Spalinger-Røes · CC BY 3.0 Roskilde Cathedral is both a building and a family vault for an entire royal line. Since the fifteenth century it has been the main burial church of Denmark's monarchs.
Did you know? In 1806 a coppersmith sawing an auctioned crucifix into firewood found a hidden golden cross inside its head, holding a supposed splinter of the True Cross.
05 Nyhavn
Denmark · 1.8 km from Copenhagen55.680° N 12.590° E
kallerna · CC BY-SA 4.0 Nyhavn — "New Harbour" — is a short, straight cut of water that runs about 450 metres from Kongens Nytorv, Copenhagen's grand royal square, to the Inner Harbour. King Christian V had it dug between 1670 and 1675, and the labour came from Danish soldiers and Swedish prisoners taken in the war of 1658–1660.
Did you know? The schooner Mira of 1898 spent many years carrying chalk from the cliffs of Stevns before ending up in Nyhavn.
06 Egeskov Castle
Denmark · 14.3 km from Svendborg55.176° N 10.489° E
Malene Thyssen · CC BY-SA 3.0 Egeskov is Denmark's best-preserved Renaissance water castle. It rises straight out of a small lake in the south of Funen, on foundations of oak piles. According to legend, a whole forest of oaks was felled to build them, which gave the estate its name, "oak forest". The estate is recorded from 1405.
Did you know? The house has 66 rooms and about 200 windows with more than 2,000 individual panes, and around 60 gun ports pierce its walls.
07 Grundtvig's Church
Denmark · 4.4 km from Copenhagen55.717° N 12.534° E
Unknown author · Public domain The building is a monument to a man most visitors have never heard of. S.
Did you know? The foundation stone was laid on 8 September 1921, and the finished church was consecrated on the same date in 1940.
08 Kronborg Castle
Kronborg
Denmark · 6.3 km from Helsingborg56.039° N 12.622° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
ArildV · CC BY-SA 4.0 Kronborg sits on a spit of land at the very north-eastern tip of Zealand, where the Øresund narrows to about 4 km and Sweden is plainly visible across the water.
Did you know? James VI of Scotland stayed here in 1590 after marrying Anne of Denmark and tipped the staff 2,000 dalers in gold.
09 The Sand-Covered Church
Den tilsandede kirke
Denmark · 31.2 km from Frederikshavn57.714° N 10.550° E
EHRENBERG Kommunikation · CC BY-SA 2.0 Only a whitewashed tower with a stepped gable rises from the dunes near Denmark's northern tip, yet it marks the site of a large medieval church swallowed by sand over two centuries.
Did you know? In its day it was the largest church in Vendsyssel, the northernmost region of Jutland.
10 Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Louisiana
Denmark · 13.8 km from Helsingborg55.969° N 12.543° E
kallerna · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Louisiana owes its name to a nineteenth-century romantic and its reputation to a cheese wholesaler. The estate on the Øresund coast at Humlebæk was built in 1855 by Alexander Brun, master of the royal hunt, who married three times, each time to a woman called Louise. A century later the businessman Knud W.
Did you know? Early on, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter mocked the museum's popular programme by calling it Cirkusiana.
11 Church of Our Saviour
Vor Frelsers Kirke
Denmark · 2.2 km from Copenhagen55.673° N 12.594° E
Avda · CC BY-SA 3.0 A black and gold spire, twisting upwards with a staircase wound around its outside, makes the Church of Our Saviour one of the most recognisable silhouettes in Copenhagen. The church stands in Christianshavn, the canal district built in the seventeenth century on reclaimed land across the harbour from the old city.
Did you know? King Frederick V climbed the newly finished spire himself at a ceremony on 28 August 1752.
12 Kastellet
Denmark · 2.4 km from Copenhagen55.692° N 12.594° E
CucombreLibre from New York, NY, USA · CC BY 2.0 Kastellet is a seventeenth-century star fort that still works for the army and doubles as one of Copenhagen's favourite parks. Its origin was St Anne's Redoubt, an outpost that King Christian IV built in 1626 to guard the harbour entrance.
Did you know? The surviving powder house of 1712 has massive walls and a gently vaulted roof designed to send the force of any explosion straight upward.
13 Hammershus
Denmark55.271° N 14.756° E
Johan Wessman / News Oresund · CC BY 2.0 Hammershus, on a crag 74 metres above the Baltic on the northwestern tip of Bornholm, is the largest medieval castle ruin in Northern Europe.
Did you know? Stone from the ruin was used to build the Hovedvagten, the old main guardhouse in Rønne.
14 Rubjerg Knude and Lighthouse
Rubjerg Knude
Denmark57.449° N 9.774° E
Image by kordi_vahle from Pixabay Rubjerg Knude is the highest point of Lønstrup Klint, a cliff of sand and clay about 15 km long on the North Sea coast of Vendsyssel, running between Lønstrup and Løkken.
Did you know? The original lens, made by the French firm Barbier & Bénard, had 134 hand-ground prisms and turned on a bath of mercury.
15 Råbjerg Mile
Denmark · 25.1 km from Frederikshavn57.649° N 10.407° E
Olgierd Rudak · CC BY-SA 4.0 Råbjerg Mile is a hill of bare sand that refuses to stay put. Rising to about 40 metres and covering roughly two square kilometres at the northern tip of Jutland, it is the largest migrating dune in Northern Europe and the only big wandering dune left in Denmark.
Did you know? At their worst, drifting dunes in northern Jutland pushed up to seven kilometres inland, driving farmers away from the coast.
16 Den Blå Planet, Copenhagen
Den Blå Planet
Denmark · 7.6 km from Copenhagen55.638° N 12.656° E
Image by StudioKlick from Pixabay The Blue Planet begins before you are inside. Seen from the air, or from a plane dropping into Copenhagen Airport next door, the building is a spiral of curved arms unwinding from a central core, like water swirling into a drain.
Did you know? Plans for the 10,000-square-metre building, costing about 630 million Danish kroner, were made public in June 2007.
17 Østerlars Church
Østerlars Kirke
Denmark55.171° N 14.962° E
Unukorno · CC BY-SA 4.0 Østerlars Church looks less like a village church than a small castle: a thick round drum of fieldstone braced by heavy sloping buttresses and capped by a steep conical roof, standing in the farmland of northern Bornholm.
Did you know? In times of danger the second floor sheltered the local population, and in peacetime it served farmers as a storeroom.
18 Skovtårnet
Denmark55.253° N 11.977° E
Johan Wessman / News Oresund · CC BY 2.0 Rising out of the woods of the Gisselfeld estate on Zealand, Skovtårnet, the Forest Tower, is shaped like an hourglass twisted around its own axis.
Did you know? The ramp coils through twelve circular levels, and its slope dictated the tower's whole geometry so that everyone can reach the top without steps.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Denmark?
- On our list, Tivoli Gardens ranks first, followed by Møns Klint and Frederiksborg Palace.
- Is Kronborg Castle the real Elsinore from Hamlet?
- Yes. Kronborg in Helsingør is the castle Shakespeare called Elsinore, and Hamlet has been staged in its courtyard many times. The castle is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- Why is the church at Skagen buried in sand?
- Drifting sand from the coast gradually filled the churchyard and nave of St Lawrence's Church from the 1700s onward. The parish gave up and closed it in 1795; the nave was demolished, and the tower was kept as a landmark for sailors.
- How were the chalk cliffs of Møns Klint formed?
- The chalk was laid down on the bed of a warm Cretaceous sea from the skeletons of microscopic plankton. Ice sheets of the last ice age later thrust and folded the chalk layers upward, and the sea has been cutting into them ever since.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Denmark?
- In our collection, the places in Denmark are most often churches (4), castles (3), dunes (2) and cliffs (1).
- How many places are on this list in Denmark?
- The list covers 18 places.