Textures, Tones and Vibes of Copenhagen

May 1st, 2018

After strolling through the very heart of Indre By, we wandered into the northern part of Copenhagen’s inner city. It is mostly residential and full of tiny details that make every old city irresistible to a photographer. One can spend hours wandering the streets of Copenhagen absorbing the visual richness of old buildings, appreciating the architecture and creating tactile memories of the place.

The colourful buildings of Nyboder — the row house district of former naval barracks — offer plentiful colours and textures interweaved with the rich history. The deep yellow colour of row houses characteristic for this district is generally called “Nyboder yellow”.

Right next to the former barracks, on the sea shore, a pentagon-shaped citadel, or Kastellet, is erected. Built in 1664, it’s one of the best-preserved fortresses in Europe and a host to military garrison. Despite military presence, the citadel hosts a large public park and a number of historic attractions.

The famous statue of Little Mermaid can be found right next to the citadel. Always surrounded by tourists, it’s less interesting (in my humble opinion) than Gefion fountain, depicting the Norse goddess Gefion with four sea oxen. The tricycles used by street cleaning services in Copenhagen impressed us no less than the sculptures.

We turned back to Kongens Have, the King’s Garden, devouringly absorbing the atmosphere of the old city, stopping at almost every corner to take pictures.

One of the things that impressed us the most in Copenhagen is the colourfulness of houses, highlighting the individuality of every building. Even though architecturally the districts are not too diverse, the colours create rather memorable impression.

The King’s Garden seems to be a popular place for jogging, summer concerts, and wedding photography. The garden used to deliver fruits, vegetables and flowers to the royal household in 17th century, but since then has transformed to a large public space with a number of monuments and pavilions, erected in the following centuries.

To the north of Kongens Have lies Botanical Garden, with a prominent pavilion housing a notorious collection of tropical plants called the Palm House. It definitely worths a visit, as the architectural style of the pavilion was an engineering marvel back in 1872, and remains quite interesting even today.

The weather turned from grim and cloudy to rainy, so we stopped by Grød in Torvehallerne, a fresh food market, for a late lunch and returned to the hotel room to take some rest and shrug off the jetlag.