A bishop’s fortress built to guard a fishing town became the ruins beneath its own parliament, a toll collected from a Renaissance castle across the water funded the Danish crown for four centuries, and a 19th-century pleasure garden is said to have shaped an American entertainer’s vision of a theme park.

Copenhagen’s first town dates to the 11th century, but its decisive early moment came around 1160, when King Valdemar I granted the site to Bishop Absalon, who built a castle there in 1167 to protect the fishing settlement’s herring trade from raiders; under his control the town grew tenfold, and it received its formal city charter in 1254 under Bishop Jakob Erlandsen. Absalon’s castle stood for two centuries before the Hanseatic League conquered and demolished it in 1368–69, and its ruins, excavated in the early 20th century, remain visible today directly beneath Christiansborg Palace. Denmark’s wealth in the centuries that followed rested heavily on the Sound Dues, a toll on every foreign ship passing through the Øresund strait, introduced by King Eric of Pomerania in 1429 and collected at Helsingør under the guns of a fortress built for exactly that purpose; rebuilt as the Renaissance castle of Kronborg between 1574 and 1585, it supplied up to two-thirds of the Danish crown’s income through the 16th and 17th centuries and, two centuries later, lent its ramparts to Shakespeare as the “Elsinore” of Hamlet, first staged there in 1816.

Copenhagen’s harbour canal Nyhavn was dug between 1670 and 1675 under King Christian V using Danish soldiers and Swedish prisoners of war, and functioned for two centuries as a rough sailors’ waterfront before its eventual gentrification; the writer Hans Christian Andersen lived at three different addresses along it over roughly eighteen years. The city twice came under British attack in the Napoleonic era, in a 1801 naval battle and a far more destructive 1807 bombardment that killed several hundred people and burned close to a thousand buildings. Tivoli Gardens opened in 1843 as a public pleasure garden of rides, pavilions and live entertainment, and is widely said to have left a lasting impression on Walt Disney during a 1951 visit later credited as an influence on Disneyland; the same Viking-age history that has been retold many times over in film and television sits, in its original form, in the National Museum of Denmark’s galleries a short walk from Christiansborg. Modern Copenhagen’s reach across the water was formalised in 2000, when the Øresund Bridge opened a direct road and rail link to Malmö in Sweden, turning what was once a sea crossing enforced by cannon fire into a same-day train ride.