Den Gamle By — the Living Old Town

About this place

Den Gamle By is the world's first open-air town museum (1914): seventy-five historic houses moved from across Denmark and rebuilt as a complete street — but its genius is that it is not one village but three adjacent eras you walk between: an 1864 town with its shops, a 1927 quarter with its bakery and cinema, and a 1974 street with its record shop and hippie flat. Life here is acted, not displayed: a baker genuinely baking, a smith striking, a 1927 lady ironing with a coal iron and telling you today's prices — they sell you what they make in today's currency, and entering the houses and flats is permitted as though you were a guest. The 1974 section especially strikes European visitors with complete visual nostalgia (a flat in seventies furniture with its single colour television), and the children's section dresses them in period clothes and sets them to its games. Christmas turns it a historic market in snow and lanterns — its most famous season uncontested.