Your Rainbow Panorama
A coloured glass walkway crowning the roof.
Jon Wickmann — CC BY 3.0 · Villy Fink Isaksen — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Colin — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Mozzihh — CC BY-SA 4.0
ARoS is the museum known for its roof before its collection: Your Rainbow Panorama — a 150-metre circular glass walkway of coloured panes crowning the building (2011, Olafur Eliasson) that you walk while the city below changes colour by colour: red to orange to yellow until the circuit completes and you have seen Aarhus through the full seven-band spectrum. The building itself is ten cubic brick floors designed on the Divine Comedy: you climb from Hell in the basement — dark halls of confronting contemporary installations, most famously James Turrell's Gap of the Night — through Purgatory in the middle to Paradise above, where the glowing arc waits. Its iconic piece is Boy (Ron Mueck): a crouching child sculpture five metres tall, hyper-real down to hairs and pores — standing in the main atrium to astonish everyone entering, before any ticket. ARoS is Denmark's most visited museum outside Copenhagen, and Aarhus's cultural centre uncontested.
A coloured glass walkway crowning the roof.
From Hell in the basement to Paradise at the top.
Aros Allé 2, 8000 Aarhus
MølleparkenThe oldest public park in Aarhus, and its smallest and most used — on the river 3 minutes walk4.5
Aarhus City HallA building that divided its city when it opened in 1942, and eighty years later 4 minutes walk4.3
StrøgetThe main pedestrian street in Aarhus, running through the city centre north from5 minutes walk4.3
Church of Our Lady, AarhusAn ordinary-looking church from outside, hiding beneath it the oldest standing s7 minutes walk4.6
Lille TorvA small square in the heart of old Aarhus, its name meaning the little square, d8 minutes walk4.4The rainbow needs the full ticket, not entered separately — but two hours cover both: atrium and Boy, then the dark basement, the floors, and the rainbow as finale (the museum's own route is designed to climb this way). For the time-pressed: the atrium is free, and the lit rainbow from outside at night is the city's first sight.