Danish cities, found on the map

Every one on the map

Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 3 learning regions, matching the rounds on the Denmark guide. Regions with no places in this map’s selection are omitted.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 12 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

København

Copenhagen grew from a fishing village that Bishop Absalon fortified in 1167, and its name means the merchants’ harbor. Around 1.4 million people live in the urban area, roughly a quarter of the country. It faces Malmö across four kilometers of water at its narrowest, and since 1 July 2000 the Øresund crossing has carried a road and a railway over a bridge, onto an artificial island, and then into a tunnel so that ships and aircraft both have clear passage.

Aarhus

Aarhus was Aros in the Viking age, a name meaning river mouth, and it has been a town since the eighth century, which makes it one of the oldest in the country. Its university opened in 1928 and the city is young by average age because of it. ARoS, the art museum, carries Olafur Eliasson’s circular walkway Your Rainbow Panorama on its roof, 150 meters around and glazed in every color of the spectrum.

Odense

Odense is the third largest city in Denmark and the main town of Funen, and its name means Odin’s shrine. Hans Christian Andersen was born here in 1805 to a shoemaker and a washerwoman, left at fourteen, and the house is now a museum with a Kengo Kuma building around it. Knud IV, the last Danish king to try to invade England, was killed at the altar of St Alban’s church here in 1086 and made a saint for it.

Aalborg

Aalborg sits where the Limfjord is narrow enough to bridge, which is why the town is there and why the railway crosses under it. Lindholm Høje, on the hill on the far bank, is a burial ground of some 700 graves that blowing sand buried and preserved from the Viking age. The city distilled akvavit from 1881 and was a cement and tobacco town before it was a university one.

Esbjerg

Esbjerg exists because parliament voted for it. Denmark lost the duchies in 1864 and with them its harbors on the North Sea, so a new one was built here on an empty stretch of coast from 1868, and the town came after the harbor rather than before it. It was for a long time the largest fishing port in the country and is now the base for the North Sea oil fields and for the yards that ship offshore wind turbines out.

Helsingør

The crossing to Helsingborg is about four kilometers and takes twenty minutes. Kronborg, the castle on the point, was rebuilt in the 1570s so its guns could reach any ship in the channel, and Denmark charged a toll on every one of them from 1429 until 1857. Shakespeare set Hamlet here, calling it Elsinore, and the castle went on the World Heritage list in 2000.

Rønne

Rønne is the main town of Bornholm, which is granite rather than the sand and clay the rest of Denmark is made of, and which is closer to Sweden and Poland than it is to Copenhagen. About 39,000 people live on the island. Four of its churches are round, built in the twelfth century with walls two meters thick and an upper floor to retreat to, and Rønne itself was bombed by Soviet aircraft in May 1945 when the German garrison would not surrender to them.

Skagen

Skagen is a fishing town on a spit of moving sand, and the sand won more than once: the church of St Laurence was abandoned in 1795 with only its tower left above the dunes. In the 1870s painters came for the light, and P.S. Krøyer, Anna Ancher and Michael Ancher stayed to make the place a school of its own. It is still one of the largest fishing ports in Denmark.

Roskilde

Roskilde was the capital of Denmark until the fifteenth century, and its cathedral, begun in the 1170s, was the first Gothic church in Scandinavia built of brick and is where about forty Danish kings and queens are buried. Five Viking ships were sunk across the fjord around 1070 to block the channel against raiders; they were raised in 1962 and are in the museum on the shore. The festival on the fields south of town has run since 1971.

Kolding

Koldinghus, the castle above the town, was built around 1268 to watch what was then the border between the kingdom and the duchy of Schleswig, and it burned down in 1808 when Spanish troops billeted there lit too large a fire. The ruin was left standing for most of two centuries and then rebuilt from 1972 in a way that shows plainly which parts are old and which are new.

Randers

Randers stands where the Gudenå meets the sea, and the Gudenå is the longest river in Denmark at about 146 kilometers, which in a country this flat is less a river than a very slow lake. The town was a market and a bridging point from the Middle Ages. The glove trade made it rich in the eighteenth century, and the salmon that used to come up the river are on its coat of arms.

Nykøbing Falster

Nykøbing sits on the Guldborgsund, the narrow water between Falster and Lolland, and it is the town everything heading to Germany goes through. Gedser, at the bottom of the island, is the southernmost point in Denmark and has the ferry to Rostock. The Storstrøm bridge of 1937 carried the road and rail link north to Zealand for eighty years, and its replacement, at just over three kilometers, is the largest Danish construction project of the decade after the tunnel being dug under the belt to the west.

How this one works

The other maps of Denmark

Sweden has the same map in Swedish cities. India has the same map in Indian cities. Mexico has the same map in Mexican cities. United States has the same map in American cities. China has the same map in Chinese cities. Turkey has the same map in Turkish cities. France has the same map in French cities. Japan has the same map in Japanese cities. Germany has the same map in German cities. Spain has the same map in Spanish cities. Brazil has the same map in Brazilian cities. United Kingdom has the same map in British cities. Italy has the same map in Italian cities. South Korea has the same map in Korean cities. All three together on the Denmark atlas page, the country itself on the Denmark guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.