Copenhagen packs a national gallery, a Roman sculpture collection and the modernist design canon within cycling distance, and still keeps the Royal Danish Ballet dancing Bournonville in an 1874 theatre. Three days from Golden Age canvases to welding-hall installations.
Denmark's national gallery holds some 260,000 works, from Mantegna and Cranach to Hammershøi's grey interiors and the Danish Golden Age rooms. Open Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00, Wed to 20:00; the permanent collection costs nothing.
A merchant's townhouse on Kronprinsessegade holding the largest Islamic art collection in Scandinavia — Mughal jade, Persian miniatures, Ottoman ceramics — alongside Danish Golden Age and European rococo rooms. Tue–Sun 10:00–17:00, Wed to 21:00.
Set in an 18th-century rococo hospital on Bredgade, the Danish Design Chronicles gallery lines up Wegner's Wishbone chair, Arne Jacobsen's Egg and Poul Henningsen's lamps. Fully rebuilt and reopened in 2022. Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00.
OMA's 2018 BLOX block straddles the harbour ring road and houses DAC's exhibitions on Nordic urbanism and housing, plus a public roof terrace over Christians Brygge and a slide running through the building's core.
Brewer Carl Jacobsen's 1897 museum wraps a palm-filled Winter Garden with Etruscan bronzes, Roman portrait busts, Egyptian sarcophagi, the largest Rodin holding outside France and a room of Gauguin. Tue–Sun 10:00–17:00.
Bindesbøll's ochre 1848 building, Denmark's oldest museum, holds Bertel Thorvaldsen's complete neoclassical output in plaster and marble across mosaic-floored halls, with the sculptor himself buried in the central courtyard.
The 1874 Old Stage is home to the Royal Danish Ballet and its 250-year Bournonville tradition, the oldest continuously danced repertoire in the world. Guided tours cross the stage, the wings and the royal box.
Henning Larsen's 2005 opera house faces Amalienborg straight across the harbour, its maple-clad auditorium lit by three Olafur Eliasson glass globes. Curtain is usually 19:30 or 20:00 for opera, earlier for concerts.
The 1760 cemetery doubles as Nørrebro's park, where locals run and picnic along lime avenues between the graves of Søren Kierkegaard, Hans Christian Andersen and Niels Bohr. Open daily from 07:00, to 22:00 in summer.
A 300-metre Nørrebro street rebuilt from a 1980s problem block into the city's densest run of independents: ceramics studios, Coffee Collective's roastery, Meyers Bageri, natural-wine bars and Danish jewellery workshops.
The white-tiled 1930s Meatpacking District now holds Copenhagen's commercial gallery core — V1 Gallery, Eighteen and Etage Projects — showing Danish and international contemporary artists. Most open Wed–Sat, roughly 12:00–18:00.
A 7,000 sqm former Burmeister & Wain welding hall on the industrial island of Refshaleøen, given over to installation art at a scale no white cube allows — Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono and Pipilotti Rist have all filled it.