The Best 5 Castles Around Copenhagen You Should Visit

I came to Copenhagen as much for the palaces as for the harbour, and I still think the best way to see the castles around Copenhagen is to split them in two. Three of them sit in the city, close enough that I walked them in a single royal loop. The other two are day trips: Kronborg at Elsinore, and Frederiksborg on the lake in Hillerød.

I went inside all five. I watched the changing of the guard at Amalienborg, stepped into the Marble Church, climbed the Round Tower and walked the King’s Garden. Around Christiansborg I also visited Holmen’s Church and Thorvaldsens Museum. On the coast I combined Kronborg with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in one day, and I spent time in Elsinore town, not only at the fortress.

This is the route I would follow again: a royal walking tour of Amalienborg, Christiansborg and Rosenborg, then two separate days out of the city. It sits alongside my Copenhagen city guide if you want a wider plan for the capital.

This post contains affiliate links, including the GetYourGuide boxes. If you book through them I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Castles around Copenhagen at a glance

Here is how I would divide the five palaces. I would not try to force all of them into a single day.

• A royal walking tour in the city. Start at Amalienborg for the palace square, the museum and the changing of the guard, then walk to the Marble Church. Cross to Christiansborg for the reception rooms, with Holmen’s Church and Thorvaldsens Museum next door. Finish at Rosenborg and the King’s Garden, and climb the Round Tower in between.
• A day trip to Kronborg and Elsinore. I combined the castle with time in Elsinore town and a stop at Louisiana in Humlebæk, which sits on the same coastal railway.
• A day trip to Frederiksborg in Hillerød. The S-train from Copenhagen typically takes 35 to 40 minutes, and the castle on the lake is a comfortable half-day or an unhurried full day.

The three city palaces are the ones you can string together on foot. The two day-trip castles each deserve their own outing.

How to visit, and the Copenhagen Card

I did the city palaces on foot, and I used the train for Kronborg, Louisiana and Frederiksborg. You do not need a car for any of the five.

If you are already planning museums as well as palaces, the Copenhagen Card is the straightforward way to combine them. I set out how I would use it, including Rosenborg and the galleries around it, in my Copenhagen Card museum guide. Check the official card list before you go, because inclusion can change, and I have not listed prices or hours here for that reason.

Amalienborg

1760, Rococo

The royal family’s main residence, and a museum of the monarchy

Amalienborg is still the royal family’s main home in Copenhagen. It is a square of four Rococo palaces, completed around 1760 in Frederiksstaden. They were built as noble residences, and the court moved here after Christiansborg burned in 1794. King Frederik X now lives in Frederik VIII’s Palace, after Queen Margrethe II’s abdication on 14 January 2024.

The square is an easy walk from Designmuseum Danmark on Bredgade and from other iconic museums in the same part of town. The Little Mermaid is not a short hop from the palace: she sits further along the harbour at Langelinie, and I would not treat her as a quick add-on from Amalienborg Square.

The changing of the guard

I watched the changing of the Royal Life Guard on the palace square. A ceremony takes place here daily around midday. When the King is in residence, the fuller King’s Guard often includes the band; on other days you may see a Lieutenant’s Guard or a smaller Palace Guard. There is always at least a Palace Guard, so the square is still worth timing for the middle of the day, even if the scale is not identical every time.

I went inside the Amalienborg Museum, in Christian VIII’s Palace, and it is the closest the public can get to the people behind the Danish monarchy. The rooms cover roughly the last 150 years of the Glücksburg line, preserved as though the family had only just left, and they tell a family story as much as a state one.

From the museum I continued into the piano nobile, including the Gala Hall. That hall, not the open square, is the richly gilded room the court furnished after the move in 1794. Bertel Thorvaldsen made sculptures for it, and it is still one of the most impressive interiors I saw in the city. Queen Louise’s private salon, from around 1895, feels more intimate: the paintings and the framed photographs on the tables show her family life and her ties across Europe.

The Fabergé Chamber holds a notable collection of Russian court jewellery and Fabergé objects, tied to the Danish-Russian royal family, including Princess Dagmar, later Empress Maria Feodorovna. It is an important collection, and it does not need to be called the most important in the world.

Christian VII’s Palace is usually seen on a guided tour, including rooms used for the New Year banquet and other state occasions. I visited the museum rather than that tour, so I have left it as an option if you want to go further.

The Marble Church, and other highlights of Amalienborg

I walked over to the Marble Church, formally Frederik’s Church, which closes the axis of the palace square with its grand dome. Frederik V laid the foundation stone in 1749, but the church was not finished until 1894, and only then did it become the focal point of Amalienborg.

I went inside, and the interior under the dome is as calm as the copper roof is striking from the square.

Christiansborg

1907–1928, Neo-baroque, on a much older royal site

Parliament, royal reception rooms, and a millennium of the city

Christiansborg sits on Slotsholmen, and it really is a miniature of Copenhagen’s history, as long as the dates are told in the right order. Bishop Absalon built a fortress here in the 1160s, often dated to 1167. The Hanseatic League demolished it in 1368 or 1369.

Copenhagen Castle rose on the ruins and later became the main royal residence. Christian VI then replaced that castle with the first palace actually called Christiansborg, built around 1731 to 1745. It burned in 1794, and only the Royal Stables from that phase still stand.

A second palace, by C.F. Hansen, was inaugurated in 1828 and burned in 1884; the Palace Chapel survived that fire. The palace we see today is the third, designed by Thorvald Jørgensen, built from 1906 or 1907 and completed in 1928, with a granite exterior in a Neo-baroque style.

It is no longer only a royal residence. The Danish Parliament and the Supreme Court also sit here. The monarch uses the royal reception rooms for state dinners, banquets and official receptions, and today that monarch is King Frederik X.

I went through the royal reception rooms, and I also saw the ruins under the palace and the Royal Stables, which survived the 1794 fire. The ruins make the older story visible: you are standing on Absalon’s island, not in a building that dates from 1259. Behind the palace, the royal family’s white horses and carriages are still kept between the marble columns of the stables.

I also walked next door to Thorvaldsens Museum, a calm, colourful building of sculpture and painting devoted to Bertel Thorvaldsen, and I stopped at Holmen’s Church. That church was the venue of Queen Margrethe II’s marriage to Henri de Laborde de Monpezat in 1967, a piece of recent royal history that still sits quietly beside the palace.

Highlights of the reception rooms

Inside, the Queen’s Staircase leads into the sequence of event halls: the Alexander Room, the Abildgaard Room and the Queen’s Library.

The Alexander Room is named for Thorvaldsen’s frieze of Alexander the Great entering Babylon.

The Abildgaard Room holds Nicolai Abildgaard’s painting, and the Swedish Gallery hangs portraits of Swedish kings.

The Queen’s Library is a beautiful pair of rooms with a selection of the royal reference library on the shelves. Most of that library, now HM The King’s Reference Library, has been based at Amalienborg since 1985, so the books you see here are not the entire collection.

The Great Hall is the ceremonial heart of the palace, about 40 metres long and 10 metres high, and it is used for banquets, state visits and New Year receptions. Around the hall hang 17 tapestries by Bjørn Nørgaard — 11 large narrative pieces and six narrower interpieces.

They were a gift from Danish business for Queen Margrethe II’s 50th birthday in 1990, and they were hung here in 2000 for her 60th. Together they narrate a thousand years of Denmark’s history, from Viking times to the present day.

The Velvet Hall is where guests are presented to the royal family at banquets. In the Throne Room, the monarch receives foreign ambassadors, and Danish kings and queens are proclaimed from the balcony — including King Frederik X, on 14 January 2024. King Frederik VI’s Room shows four paintings by C.W. Eckersberg that hung in the Great Hall of the previous palace until the fire of 1884.

Rosenborg

1606–1634, Dutch Renaissance

The treasury, the crown jewels, and a walk in the King’s Garden

Rosenborg looks small from the lawn, and that is part of its charm. Christian IV built it as a summer palace for himself and the royal family, and he expanded it between 1606 and 1634, including a music chamber. I went inside, and the rooms are arranged as a chronological tour from his reign through to the 19th century, not as a single snapshot of 19th-century life. The castle opened to the public in 1838.

It sits in the city, a short walk from the Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK), the Hirschsprung Collection and the Natural History Museum.

Rosenborg and those nearby museums are all easier to combine with the Copenhagen Card — here is how I would put them together in my Copenhagen Card museum guide. If you would rather see the castle with a guide, there is also a Copenhagen inner-city and Rosenborg tour.

I walked the King’s Garden around the moat, Denmark’s oldest royal garden, planted at the beginning of the 17th century with the castle itself. Between Rosenborg and Christiansborg I also climbed the Round Tower, which Christian IV completed in 1642 as an observatory. I walked up the broad spiral ramp and looked out over the king’s Copenhagen.

Highlights of Rosenborg

The castle has three floors. On the ground floor I lingered in Christian IV’s Winter Room, with its collection of Netherlandish art.

Movable tiles in the corners hide secret music channels, and the gilt silver rider is Christian IV, paid for with prizes he won tilting at the ring during his coronation festivities in 1596.

In the Writing Room, family portraits hang on the wall, including Christian IV’s mother, Queen Sophie, Duke Ulrik, and the king with the crown. Christian IV died in the Bedchamber here on 28 February 1648.

Christian IV’s toilet is the lowest of the three, with its own chute to the moat. The beautiful tiles are from Delft and were put up in 1705.

In the Dark Room, wax figures depict Frederik III, Queen Sophie Amalie and their son Prince George. As a prank, the trouser-wetting chair could grab a person with grapples hidden in the armrests, then soak the seat with water from a holder in the backrest. The Garden Room is Christian IV’s bathroom, and the mythological painting celebrates the power of wine.

The Marble Chamber, decorated with Italian scagliola in 1668, hails the absolute monarch. Nearby, Christian V’s chamber, the Stone Corridor’s genealogical chart and the Stair Tower’s 17th-century tournament pictures carry the story forward.

On the first floor, the Princess’s Lacquered Chamber belonged to Princess Sophie Hedvig, with Chinese-lacquer wall decoration from 1665, among the oldest of its kind. In Frederik IV’s Hall, a table inlaid with semi-precious stones was a gift from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, shown with a lenticular portrait of the king and his sister and a boxwood set of table, mirror and gueridons.

Frederik V’s Cabinet is a delicate room of Berlin tapestries, a rare amber chandelier and a Paris birdcage with a clock, a music box and movable birds.

In Frederik VII’s room, a window vitrine holds the pen with which the king signed the democratic constitution of 1849.

On the second floor, the Long Hall is dominated by the coronation throne, often described as ivory and more precisely made of narwhal tusk. It is an impressive sight at the end of the climb.

The collections run from the late 16th century of Christian IV through to the 19th century, and some of the objects once belonged to the nobility as well as to the court. The highlights, for me, were the Crown Jewels, the Crown of King Christian IV, and the Danish Crown Regalia in the Treasury.

Kronborg, and a day trip to Elsinore

Renaissance fortress, rebuilt from 1574

Shakespeare’s Elsinore, and a castle on the Sound

Kronborg has been a stronghold at the northeastern tip of Zealand, at the narrowest point of the Øresund, for centuries. The first fortress on the site was Krogen, built in the 1420s by Erik of Pomerania (Erik VII of Denmark), to control the Sound and the dues levied on ships between Denmark and Sweden. Those Sound Dues lasted, in one form or another, from 1429 until 1857.

The Renaissance castle visitors see today is Frederik II’s rebuild, begun in 1574 and largely complete in the 1580s, with spires, sandstone, columns and copper roofs. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000.

I went inside, and I also spent time in Elsinore town, not only at the fortress. Kronborg is world-famous as the setting of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. A popular claim is that Shakespeare was inspired by Frederik II’s parties, which were known around Europe; it is a good story, and it remains a tourism tradition rather than a documented fact. You can walk the Flag Bastion, the Queen’s Chamber and the Chapel with that play in mind, but the real history of the castle is already rich enough.

A fire destroyed much of the castle in 1629. The chapel survived, and Christian IV had the rest vividly restored, with a golden roof, a moat and reinforced walls. In 1658 the Swedish army took the fortress and plundered many of its valuables.

The interiors are more austere than Rosenborg or Frederiksborg, and that is part of the atmosphere. I walked the royal apartments, the chapel, the ballroom and the casemates, including what was once the casemate kitchen. The major draw is still the grandeur from the outside, and the open view of the strait.

Elsinore town and Louisiana, on the same day

I combined Kronborg with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in one day, and I would do it that way again. Louisiana sits on the coast at Humlebæk, on the same railway between Copenhagen and Elsinore, and it is one of the most visited contemporary art museums in Denmark.

After the castle I wandered Elsinore itself — the harbour and the old streets — and I wrote a fuller plan in my Elsinore day-trip guide if you want the town, the museums and the street art in more detail.

Highlights of Kronborg

The royal apartments were the home of the king and queen when they stayed at Kronborg.

The chambers were first designed when Frederik II transformed Krogen into this Renaissance castle, and Christian IV had to recreate them after the fire of 1629.

The Great Ballroom is about 62 metres long, and it was the largest hall of its kind in northern Europe in its day.

The royal couple’s two eldest daughters were married here. Guests at the parties sat along the sides at banqueting tables.

At the King’s Tapestries exhibit I found seven tapestries from a series of more than 40, commissioned by Frederik II around 1580, with portraits of Danish kings including Erik VII, Knud VI, Valdemar II “the Victorious,” Christoffer II, Erik VI and Oluf. A further seven are now at the National Museum of Denmark; the rest have been lost.

The casemates run under the castle in two storeys. The upper level held practical rooms, including a guard room, a smithy and stables; the lower level was a shelter in time of war. These dark, damp rooms could hold around 350 men with supplies for a six-week siege.

This is also where I found the legendary hero Holger Danske, or Ogier the Dane, asleep in the darkness. According to the legend, the slumbering giant will wake whenever Denmark is threatened by a foreign enemy.

The chapel has beautifully carved and colourful Renaissance interiors. It was consecrated in 1582 and survived the great fire of 1629, and it still gives a sense of the painted splendour that originally characterised the whole castle. The Cannon Tower, an immense flat-roofed tower, looks out across Kronborg and the Sound to Sweden, and back over the city of Elsinore.

Frederiksborg

Early 17th century, Renaissance, with later Baroque work

The “Nordic Versailles,” and Denmark’s Museum of National History

What makes Frederiksborg instantly recognisable is that the castle sits on three islets in a lake. It is often called the “Nordic Versailles,” and it is widely described as the largest Renaissance castle in Scandinavia. I went inside, and I would give it its own day from Copenhagen. The S-train to Hillerød typically takes 35 to 40 minutes, not a full hour, and the walk from the station to the lake is straightforward.

Frederiksborg was a royal residence of Christian IV, whose main rebuild belongs to the early 17th century, often dated around 1600 to 1620. After a fire in 1859 the castle was restored, and Denmark’s Museum of National History has been housed here since 1878. The museum was founded by the brewer J. C. Jacobsen as a department of the Carlsberg Foundation. Besides the Chapel, the Rose, the Audience Chamber and the Great Hall, it holds Denmark’s most important collection of portraits and history paintings, with a chronological collection from 1500 to the present day.

Highlights of Frederiksborg

The Rose, also called the Knight’s Room, is a reconstruction of how it looked in the time of Christian IV, when it was a dining room for the lords and ladies of the court. Special exhibitions are often held in the other rooms.

The Chapel dates from Christian IV’s time and survived the 1859 fire. The Audience Chamber is a separate, later work: it was designed and completed by the architect Lambert van Haven for Christian V in the 1680s. On the first floor, the period of the first Oldenburg kings, from Christian I to Christian IV, is covered at the start of the circuit, and the years from 1850 to 1900, including the Schleswig Wars, come later.

On the second floor, the Great Hall is a reconstruction of its appearance in Christian IV’s time, with paintings and furniture from the early period of absolutism, then portraits and furnishings from 1700 to 1850.

The top floor brings the story into the 20th and 21st centuries, with a photo gallery for changing exhibitions.

Castles around Copenhagen: FAQ

Can I see all five castles around Copenhagen in one day?

I would not try to. The three city palaces — Amalienborg, Christiansborg and Rosenborg — make a full royal walking tour, especially if you include the changing of the guard, the Marble Church, the Round Tower and the King’s Garden. Save Kronborg and Frederiksborg for two separate day trips. I combined Kronborg with Louisiana and Elsinore town in one day, and I gave Frederiksborg its own outing to Hillerød.

What is the difference between Amalienborg, Christiansborg and Rosenborg?

Amalienborg is the royal family’s main residence, with a museum of the last 150 years and a daily changing of the guard on the square. Christiansborg, on Slotsholmen, is the ceremonial palace: it houses the Danish Parliament and the Supreme Court, and the monarch uses the reception rooms for state occasions. Rosenborg is Christian IV’s 17th-century summer palace, now a museum of earlier royal life, with the crown jewels in the Treasury.

How do I get to Kronborg and Frederiksborg from the city?

Both are straightforward by train, with no need for a car. Kronborg is at Elsinore (Helsingør), at the end of the coastal line, and Louisiana in Humlebæk is a stop on the way, which is how I combined them. Frederiksborg is in Hillerød, typically 35 to 40 minutes from Copenhagen on the S-train, then a short walk to the castle lake.

When is the changing of the guard at Amalienborg?

A changing of the Royal Life Guard takes place daily around midday on the palace square. The fuller parade with the band is usually when the King is in residence; otherwise you may see a smaller ceremony. I would still time a visit to the square for the middle of the day.

Does the Copenhagen Card help with these palaces and the nearby museums?

Yes, if you are already combining palaces with museums and public transport. I found the Card especially useful around Rosenborg, where SMK, the Hirschsprung Collection and the Natural History Museum sit a short walk away. I set out how I would use it in my Copenhagen Card museum guide; check the official list before you go, because inclusion can change.

The five palaces still feel, to me, like the clearest way to read the Danish monarchy in a few days: a lived-in square at Amalienborg, a working state palace at Christiansborg, a treasury at Rosenborg, a fortress on the Sound, and a museum-castle on a lake. I would walk the three in the city first, then go out to Kronborg and Frederiksborg when I had the time to give each of them a proper day.