Kronborg Castle

At the narrowest point of the Øresund — barely four kilometres of water between Denmark and Sweden — Kronborg rises above the harbour of Helsingør like a fist of sandstone and copper. King Frederik II rebuilt an older fortress here between 1574 and 1585, turning it into one of the most magnificent Renaissance castles in northern Europe, designed in large part by the Flemish architects Hans van Paeschen and Antonis van Opbergen.

For centuries the castle had a very practical purpose: it enforced the Sound Dues, a toll levied on every merchant ship passing between the Baltic and the North Sea. The cannon of Kronborg made that toll one of the Danish crown's largest sources of income, and the strait below the walls was, for a time, one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.

What it is famous for

Kronborg is known across the world as Elsinore, the setting of William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Shakespeare never visited Denmark, but he had heard of the castle from travelling English players who performed here in the 1580s. Each summer the courtyard still hosts performances of the play where its prince is said to have walked.

Deep beneath the castle, in the cold casemates, sits the brooding stone figure of Holger Danske (Ogier the Dane) — the legendary hero who, according to folklore, will wake and rise the day Denmark is in mortal danger. The castle was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2000 for its outstanding example of the Renaissance castle and its central role in the history of northern Europe.

Good to know

Today Kronborg is a museum administered as a Danish national heritage site. Visitors can walk the royal apartments, the long ballroom, the chapel and the atmospheric underground casemates. The castle stands a short walk from Helsingør station, which has frequent trains from Copenhagen (about 45 minutes), and the ferry to Helsingborg in Sweden crosses the Sound in around 20 minutes.