Day Trips from Denmark

Roskilde's cathedral guards the tombs of Danish kings. Yet the magnet is the Viking Ship Museum where five 11th-century hulls have been reassembled and you can take replica boats onto the fjord.

Shakespeare's Elsinore sits an easy coastal ride away. The castle's casemates and cannon towers stare straight across to Sweden, while the maritime museum next door is half-sunk in an old dry dock.

Six kilometres of chalk cliffs plunge into the Baltic Sea, Denmark's reply to Dover but with half the visitors. A stepped boardwalk drops you to the beach for fossil hunting.

A moated Renaissance palace on three lake islands, now sheltering Denmark's national portrait gallery. Rowboats loop the baroque gardens and you can paddle a kayak right up to the sandstone walls.

Half-timbered streets, cobbled alleys, and a 19th-century warship you can scramble over. Ebeltoft distils Denmark into one pocket-sized town, then adds glassblowing studios and an unexpectedly serious ice-cream scene.

A sharp new museum carved into the hillside south of Aarhus, with bog bodies, rune stones, and an Iron Age house you can walk through. Woodland paths drop to a recreated Viking market beside the beach.

A slow ferry threads through the South Funen Archipelago to Ærøskøbing, a 17th-century port whose lanes are barely wider than a bike. Brightly painted houses and a micro-brewery justify the voyage.