Our holiday in Copenhagen
Wednesday 25th June
Our first destination of the day was Rosenborg Slot (Palace). We got there by walking through some of the city's many parks. Several days later, studying an old map/drawing of the city under seige, I realised that the earthworks in some of these parks, rather than being just landscaping, are actually the remains of the ramparts that used to defend the landward side of the old city.
Rosenborg Slot was built in the early 1600s by Christian IV. Shortly afterwards, it started to be used as a home for parts of the Royal Collection, as well as a Royal residence. In the early 1700s, though, Rosenborg came to be regarded as too small by Frederik IV, who moved to other royal palaces, allowing Rosenborg to begin its transition into a museum to display the Royal Collection - a transformation eventually completed in 1838, when it was opened to the general public.
While there have been some changes, the majority of the building's interior is unchanged from the 1700s, and is fascinating in its own right. When the museum was opened to the public, the collection was exhibited in chronological order. While a few extra rooms have been added since then, to cover more recent history, the arrangement continues to this day.
The palace, while small by palatial standards, is still quite large, and is packed with all sorts of stuff. I started to get portrait fatigue after a while, but there was much more - tapestries, furniture, fabulous clocks, a lathe belonging to one of the queens, ornaments of varying degrees of oddness, the clothes Christian IV was wearing when he was wounded in a naval battle in 1644 (complete with bloodstains, and the bits of shrapnel that got made into earrings for his mistress, naturally) [the list goes on, and on, and on...].
After the main collection, down to the Treasury in the basement, and the Danish Crown Jewels (hence the two young men outside with rifles, and the barracks next door)
Having gawped at enough extravagance for one morning, we had lunch, then made our way to the Round Tower, which was also built on Christian IV's orders. Apparently the oldest astronomical observatory in Europe, it is still used by amateurs for that purpose. Denmark, of course, has a long history of astronomy, being the home of Tycho Brahe, who laid much of the groundwork that led to Kepler's work on planetary orbits. While the actual observatory and roof are accessed via a short spiral staircase, the main body of the tower is comprised of a remarkable spiral ramp.
Afterwards, we made use of the rest of a warm and sunny afternoon to wend our way through several more parks, including the Botanical gardens, before heading back to the hotel. We finished the day with dinner in Tivoli Gardens.
Part of the spiral ramp in the round tower. There's an annual unicycle race up it.
A view from the top of the round tower. I've not been able to conclusively identify
the tower in the foreground, but I'm pretty sure that it's the Nikolaj
Kirke (Nicholas Church) finished in about 1910. It's a very impressive structure,
towering over the 35-metre tower I was standing on when I took this photo.
Visible in the far distance is the bridge portion of the Øresund Link, which, together with a tunnel, carries road and rail traffic to Sweden. The main span is 1092 metres long, and the whole bridge, including approaches, isn't much less than 8 kilometres.
Cal in the botanical gardens. The very top of Rosenborg Slot is just visible over the
trees in the background.