Denmark

Hygge is marketing abroad and completely real at home

Denmark is small, flat and consistently ranked among the happiest countries on earth, which is either inspiring or slightly annoying depending on the weather when you arrive. Copenhagen is the draw and deserves it, though the bill at the end of dinner will remind you where you are.

The bike culture rivals the Dutch and the city is built around it. Renting one for the week is not a novelty, it is simply how you get about, and it makes a compact city feel even smaller. The harbour is clean enough to swim in, which for a capital city is a genuinely radical piece of civic engineering.

Beyond Copenhagen there is more than people expect. Aarhus has a serious art museum and a young population. The Jutland coast has huge empty windswept beaches. Bornholm, out in the Baltic, is the island Danes go to and rarely mention to anyone else. And the food scene, post-Noma, has trickled down into ordinary places doing extraordinary things with cabbage.

Annual events and festivals

• Fastelavn (Feb) — children in costume beat a barrel of sweets. A gentler descendant of something much older.
• Copenhagen Light Festival (Feb) — installations across the harbour to get through the darkest stretch.
• Aalborg Carnival (May) — the largest carnival in Scandinavia, with tens of thousands in costume.
• Distortion, Copenhagen (Jun) — street parties that move neighbourhood by neighbourhood over five days.
• Sankt Hans Aften (23 Jun) — bonfires on beaches with a witch effigy on top, plus communal singing.
• Roskilde Festival (Jun-Jul) — one of Europe biggest music festivals, non-profit and run largely by volunteers.
• Copenhagen Jazz Festival (Jul) — ten days with hundreds of concerts, many of them free and outdoors.
• Aarhus Festuge (Aug-Sep) — a ten-day arts festival taking over the whole city.
• Culture Night, Copenhagen (Oct) — museums, palaces and even parliament open late for one night.
• Christmas at Tivoli (Nov-Dec) — the old pleasure gardens turned into the definitive Danish Christmas.