Tivoli Gardens

Interesting facts

The park's lake is a surviving piece of the moat that once ringed Copenhagen's fortifications, and the site itself lay outside the city walls until the 1850s.

It opened as Tivoli & Vauxhall, borrowing the names of the Jardin de Tivoli in Paris and London's Vauxhall Gardens.

In Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and Icelandic, the word tivoli has come to mean any amusement park.

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.

In 1844 founder Georg Carstensen predicted Tivoli would never be finished, a sentiment Walt Disney echoed a century later about Disneyland.

In June 1944, during the German occupation, saboteurs blew up parts of the park including sections of Rutschebanen, which was running again just 25 days later.

At the Pantomime Theatre the audience stands in the open air while the stage sits inside the building, a commedia tradition brought by the Italian Giuseppe Casorti.

The Star Flyer swing ride rises about 80 metres, lifting riders well above the Copenhagen skyline.

With about 4.25 million visitors in 2024, Tivoli is the most visited amusement park in Scandinavia.

Several rides are historic in their own right: the bumper cars date from 1926 and the Balloon Swing Ferris wheel opened in 1943, in the middle of the war.

Why it is worth it

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. More than 180 years later the park still occupies a compact site in the city centre, a walled garden of flowerbeds, lakes, pavilions and rides set right across the street from the main railway station.

The rides span a century. The wooden roller coaster, Rutschebanen, has run here since 1914 and is one of very few old scenic railways left where a brakeman travels on every train and controls its speed by hand; it rolls along a track of roughly 720 metres at up to about 50 km/h. Newer thrills include Dæmonen, a floorless steel coaster with inversions added in 2004, and the Star Flyer, a tall swing ride from 2006 that lifts riders high above the rooftops. Just as characteristic are the buildings: the Chinese-style Pantomime Theatre of 1874, designed by Vilhelm Dahlerup, still stages wordless commedia dell'arte behind a mechanical curtain that opens like a peacock's tail, and the white Moorish palace of Nimb, completed in 1909, now houses a hotel and restaurants. A concert hall seating about 1,660 hosts classical and popular music.

Tivoli is not a year-round park. It opens in seasons: a long summer season from spring to September with evening concerts and fireworks, a Halloween season in October, and a Christmas season from mid-November into early January, with closed weeks in between; check the park's calendar before planning a trip. Families with small children will find gentle rides and playgrounds alongside the coasters, and many adults come simply for the gardens, the restaurants and the lights after dark. Most visitors spend an afternoon and evening here, and the park is at its most atmospheric once the lamps come on.

Getting there

Tivoli is in central Copenhagen, about 0.3 km from the city centre, with its main entrance on Vesterbrogade facing Copenhagen Central Station (København H). Copenhagen Kastrup Airport (CPH) is about 8.3 km away; trains from the airport reach Central Station in roughly 15 minutes, and from the station the park gates are a short walk across the street.

Tivoli Gardens

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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