Nyhavn — the Coloured Harbour

About this place

Nyhavn is the Copenhagen postcard the world knows: a 17th-century canal (the New Harbour) lined with coloured houses — red, yellow, blue — and old wooden ships moored along it, dug by Swedish prisoners of war to link the sea directly to the King's New Square. For two centuries it was the sailors' rough harbour of taverns — Hans Christian Andersen lived in three different houses on its banks (No. 20, where he wrote his first tales, and No. 67 for twenty years) — before the twentieth century turned it into the city's longest run of cafés and restaurants. The scene itself is the visit: sit on the quay edge with a coffee as locals do (far cheaper than the restaurants), the tour boats leave from the canal's head for the classic canal cruise — and summer turns the sunny southern bank into a kilometre-long public bench.