Denmark · Old Town
Copenhagen
A self-guided walking tour of the Copenhagen Old Town, every street in two days.
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Copenhagen is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
At a glance
Plan your walk.
- Distance
- 30.1 km
- Time
- about 8.5 hours
- Streets
- 122
- Steps
- 3 streets with steps
- Start point
- Christiansborg Slot
- Phone needed while walking
- no
- Works offline
- yes
- Expires
- never
The Old Town
Every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
Landmarks
What I would eat first.
Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.
Christiansborg Slot 1,500 points
It takes a whole island, and four names on your street list are only its yards. Go through them instead of around them. Then find the way down: there is something a great deal older under the floor, in the dark, and you can walk into it.
Nationalmuseet 500 points
A whole block of it, between the canal and Ny Vestergade. Whatever time you have set aside for this one, double it, and go in through the courtyard rather than the front. I went in for a quick look and came back out a season later.
Rundetårn 500 points
At the top of Købmagergade, behind a door most people walk straight past. Go in and keep going up. How you get up is the good part, and I am not describing it. From the platform every lane in this level lies out flat in front of you.
Vor Frue Kirke 500 points
It stands on Frue Plads with the university facing it across the square, and the lane down its flank is called Dyrkøb. From out here it seems shut. It is not. Go up between the columns and see how far back the room reaches.
Helligåndskirken 250 points
It stands right on the busiest walking street in the country and hardly anybody turns their head. Go around it into the churchyard at the back. Three steps through the gate and the whole racket is gone. Best quiet on this level.
Københavns Rådhus 250 points
It is open to anyone, and hardly anybody finds that out. Walk in off the square, and once you are through the door go and look at the clock on the ground floor. It keeps the calendar and the movement of the sky at the same time, and it will still be right long after I have stopped caring what day it is.
Kongens Nytorv 250 points
The east end of the level, and the largest square in the city, so most walkers meet it last. Stand at the rim and look at the fronts turned in towards you. Not one of them agrees with its neighbour about how a building ought to finish at the top.
Rådhuspladsen 250 points
The west end of the level, where the long walking street runs out and the ground widens. Roads come in here from every direction. Stop for a minute and see which way people pick. That is a whole town making up its mind, over and over, and I could follow it for a century.
Thorvaldsens Museum 250 points
On the palace island, canal down two sides, and easy to walk past on the way to the bigger thing next door. Go into the courtyard at its centre before you look at anything else. Somebody is buried under it. Not many courtyards can say that.
Eating
Actual food.
Eating here happens at lunch, and it happens on rye. Bread has been rye in Denmark for a thousand years. The meal is one slice of it with something laid on top. Open, no lid, and eaten with a knife and fork. Almost everything that goes on top came in off the water or off the pig. There is even a correct order. Fish and shellfish first, herring before the other fish, cheese last.
Meat and fish
Sildemad
Marinated salted herring on rye spread with seasoned lard, with potato, raw red onion and capers. Salted herring out of the Sound was the great medieval export here, sold as far away as Sicily. At a lunch table it still goes first, before every other fish. Nothing in this town outranks it.
Sources: Lex, Danmarkshistorien (Aarhus Universitetsforlag): Skånemarkedet
Stegt flæsk med persillesovs
Thick slices of pork belly fried crisp, boiled potatoes, and parsley sauce over the lot. In 2014 the food ministry put the national dish to a public vote. Over sixty thousand people took part and this won with more than forty four percent. A whole country was asked what it was and answered: fried pork.
Frikadeller
Fried patties of minced pork and veal, hot with potatoes at dinner or cold on rye the next day. What makes a frikadelle is not what is in it. It is that somebody fried it. The name turns up in Denmark in the early 1700s, and only as a garnish inside somebody else's complicated dish.
Sources: Lex
Hotdog fra pølsevognen
A hot sausage in a bun, with mustard, ketchup and whatever else you point at. The first carts rolled onto this city's streets in 1921, and in Copenhagen a pitch is still granted on condition that the seller has a disability. Over seven hundred stood in the country in the 1970s and about a hundred are left. Cheapest hot food in an expensive town.
Sources: Lex
Vegetarian
Kartoffelmad
Cold boiled new potatoes sliced onto buttered rye, with mayonnaise, raw onion and chives. It is the one classic piece of smørrebrød built on a vegetable, and it sits on the menu among the fish without apologising for itself.
Crisp bacon on top is a common variant. Ask for it without.
Sources: Lex
Wienerbrød
Layered butter pastry, out of every bakery here from early morning. The country's first Vienna bakery opened on Købmagergade in the 1840s, and that street is on your list. The world calls this a Danish. Vienna calls it Kopenhagener Gebäck. Somebody is wrong and it is not me.
Sources: Lex
Rødgrød med fløde
Red summer berries boiled briefly, thickened with potato flour, cooled, and drowned in cold cream. Strawberries, raspberries, redcurrants, cherries, whatever ripened. Somebody will ask you to say the name out loud. Nobody has ever passed.
Sources: Lex
Vegan
Two, and the reason is a law. Denmark ended the fasting obligation at the Reformation in 1536, so there is no Lenten plant kitchen here of the kind you find further south. What was plant food on the old table came from being poor, not from being pious: rye, porridge, cabbage, peas, root vegetables, and a jar of pickled beetroot standing next to everything. It is real food. It just never got a season of its own.
Rugbrød
Dark sourdough rye. Coarse rye flour, water and salt, and it was the daily bread of this country for more than a thousand years, right up to the 1950s. Everything else on this list is standing on it. Dense enough to build with, and I would know.
Loaves today often carry seeds, malt or a sweetener. Ask the bakery what is in the dough if it matters to you.
Sources: Lex
Vandgrød
Porridge cooked in water rather than milk, from barley, oats, rice or buckwheat. It stood on Danish tables every day until the 1900s, then all but vanished after the war. Copenhagen put it back on a menu: dedicated porridge counters opened here from 2011.
Porridge is normally cooked in milk here. Ask for it on water.
Sources: Lex
Late breakfast
Slotskælderen hos Gitte Kik the old one
Fortunstræde 4
A vaulted cellar under a house from 1797, run by one family here since 1910, a few minutes from the castle island. You go to the counter and look at the whole spread before you choose, which beats guessing off a menu. The prime minister who built the welfare state ate here as a regular, and the room has got no grander since.
- Mon10:00–17:00
- Tue10:00–17:00
- Wed10:00–17:00
- Thu10:00–17:00
- Fri10:00–17:00
- Sat10:00–17:00
- Sun10:00–17:00
The kitchen serves from eleven and stops at three. This is a lunch, not a late afternoon.
Sources: MICHELIN Guide, Euroman (Aller Media)
Restaurant Kronborg where locals go
Brolæggerstræde 12
Low beams, a fireplace, old drawings and copies of Danish church wall paintings, and a kitchen that makes the lot from scratch. A main course starts at around sixty kroner, which in this city is worth saying out loud. A lunch house first, on a lane behind the old courthouse.
- Mon11:00–18:00
- Tue11:00–18:00
- Wed11:00–18:00
- Thu11:00–22:00
- Fri11:00–22:00
- Sat11:00–22:00
- Sun11:00–18:00
The kitchen shuts an hour before the room does. Sunday to Wednesday the room shuts at six.
Sources: Mig og København, Spiseliv.dk, VisitCopenhagen (Wonderful Copenhagen)
Afternoon coffee
Conditori La Glace the old one
Skoubogade 3-5
The city's oldest confectioner, at this address since 1870, with furniture from the 1890s in a room fitted out in 1924. More than twenty layer cakes stand in the window every day, and the coffee and the chocolate arrive in a pot to be refilled, which tells you how long you are expected to stay. One of the cakes was invented in 1891 for a first night at the theatre.
- Mon08:30–18:00
- Tue08:30–18:00
- Wed08:30–18:00
- Thu08:30–18:00
- Fri08:30–18:00
- Sat09:00–18:00
- Sun10:00–18:00
They stop serving thirty minutes before closing, every day. Six o'clock on the door means half past five at the table.
Sources: Lex, Mig og København, VisitCopenhagen (Wonderful Copenhagen)
Democratic Coffee where locals go
Krystalgade 15
A coffee bar built into the city's main library, and the library is the point rather than the joke. Everything baked is made a few metres away behind the counter, and the twice baked almond croissant is what people cross town for. Books on the shelves, daylight at the window, nobody counting how long you sit.
- Mon07:30–17:00
- Tue07:30–17:00
- Wed07:30–17:00
- Thu07:30–17:00
- Fri07:30–17:00
- Sat09:00–16:00
- Sun09:00–16:00
The pastries are baked twice a day, so what is on the counter is what there is.
Sources: Anders Husa, Filter Notes, VisitCopenhagen (Wonderful Copenhagen)
Dinner
Café Sorgenfri the old one
Brolæggerstræde 8
A red corner house, rebuilt in 1796 after the fire that took the quarter, and food has been served under this name since 1882. Portraits in gold frames, low light, red chequered cloths, and the classic plates keep coming into the evening, which almost no other house of this kind manages. Nothing in here has been redesigned in your lifetime.
- Mon11:00–23:00
- Tue11:00–23:00
- Wed11:00–23:00
- Thu11:00–23:00
- Fri11:00–23:00
- Sat11:00–23:00
- Sun12:00–18:00
The kitchen stops at a quarter to nine, and on Sunday the house shuts at six.
Sources: VisitCopenhagen (Wonderful Copenhagen), Spiseliv.dk, momondo Discover
Checked 5 September 2026.
Name origin
Why it is called Copenhagen.
København means the merchants' harbour. Saxo wrote it down in Latin first, mercatorum portus, and the Danish forms come through as Kiopmanhafn in 1231 and Købmannæhafn in 1253: the merchants', plus harbour. Most towns are named for a river, a saint or whoever got here first. This one is named for the people who came to the water to do business. I have chewed better names. I have never chewed a more honest one.
Sources: trap.lex.dk
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
Look at what is under your feet. The trading place was laid out on low, wet shore meadow between what is now Rådhuspladsen and Gammeltorv-Nytorv, and the early medieval waterline ran just south of Løngangstræde on the west side and north of Kompagnistræde and Rådhusstræde on the east. Four names on your street list are standing on the old edge of the water. What made the wet ground worth it was the position: right at the entrance to the Baltic trade, a good natural harbour, and fat farmland behind. Two of those three are about food.
Sources: lex.dk
Why then
When the first stone went down.
Nobody founded Copenhagen. Archaeology puts a trading place here in the 1000s with fishing going on from it, and the whole thing grew out of the great herring fishery in the Sound. The oldest writing that names the place is a letter from Pope Urban III in 1186, confirming that Bishop Absalon had been handed the castle of Hafn, its land, and the town along with it. Absalon had started that castle in 1167. So the town is a good two hundred years older than the first line written about it. A place gets written down when somebody wants it. Before that it just eats herring.
Sources: lex.dk
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 1167–1416
The bishops of Roskilde. Absalon began a castle on the holm off the town in 1167, and a letter from Pope Urban III in 1186 confirms that he held the castle of Hafn, its land and the town, and that all of it would go to the see of Roskilde after him. The bishops then put the terms in writing: a town law in 1254 that reads like a contract with the burghers and hands them grazing for their cattle, and another in 1294 setting out precisely what the bishop was owed. The grazing is the only clause in either of them I would have signed.
Sources: lex.dk
- 1416–1660
The kings. Erik of Pomerania took Copenhagen off the bishop of Roskilde in 1416, shortly after coming to the throne, and met no great resistance doing it. From then on the town belonged to whoever wore the crown, and it got used: Christian I set the university up here in 1479, and from 1596 Christian IV spent the good years putting up new buildings and laying out whole new quarters. Somebody's plan is under most of what you walk today.
- 1660–1849
One ruler, and no council. It came to a head with the hereditary homage to Frederik III in 1660, and from then on the institutions of the state sat permanently in the capital, which changed both how the city looked and who lived in it. That arrangement built most of what you will walk past. A town the government never leaves is a town that keeps redoing its own front.
Sources: lex.dk
- 1849–
The townspeople, more or less. The Copenhagen middle class was in the middle of it when democracy came through with the constitution of 1849, and the city then swelled from 120,000 people in 1840 to 400,000 by 1901. Five and a half centuries after a bishop set down what the burghers owed him, the burghers did the setting down. Nobody has asked me anything yet. I have time.
Sources: lex.dk
The emblem
What the shield means.
This one is not the shield. Copenhagen's arms started as a crenellated wall with towers standing over waves, a building with a cross behind them, a six-pointed star and a crescent moon above; the town had a seal by 1254 and impressions survive from 1275. The wall and the building slowly turned into three towers, and the full modern version has collected a great deal else since. Far too much for a thumbnail, which is why even the city uses a simplified one. So the icon draws the other half of the name instead. The harbour. Gabled house fronts standing shoulder to shoulder at the water, the way they stand along Gammel Strand, the oldest natural harbour here, used until the ships got too big for it.
Sources: trap.lex.dk; lex.dk
Emblem: Original artwork for Cobble Gobble — no third-party source
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
Two names on your street list carry the word vold, which is a rampart: Vester Voldgade and Nørre Voldgade. That is not decoration. The ramparts ran along there, and this level stops where they stopped. By about 1850 their military point had run out and the building ban on the fortress ground fell away; in 1867 the Rigsdag passed the act taking the older land fortification out of service, and in 1870 the municipality took the ground over and started building on it. Two street names are all that is holding the line now.
A fire broke out on 20 October 1728 and burned until the 23rd. It laid most of the medieval inner town in ashes, the whole span from Gammel Strand up to Rosenborg: of 4,087 houses a count made at the time put the loss at 1,670, a modern one at 1,450. What went back up came largely out of a pattern book. In 1729 the royal master builder J.C. Krieger published drawings for plain, serviceable burgher houses, any builder was free to use them, and a lot of those fire houses with their broad dormer bays are still standing. The lanes here are medieval. Most of the fronts along them are not.
Sources: lex.dk
Strøget is not a street. It is five of them in a row, Østergade, Amagertorv, Vimmelskaftet, Nygade and Frederiksberggade, running 1.1 km from Kongens Nytorv to Rådhuspladsen, and the name has never been official. It took over from an older nickname, Ruten, around 1880, and in 1962 the stretch became the first pedestrian street in the country. All five are on your list, so you are going to eat the whole thing whether you planned to or not.
Sources: lex.dk
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- stræde
- A narrow lane, and by a distance the commonest word on this list: Badstuestræde, Læderstræde, Magstræde, Hyskenstræde, Pilestræde, Klosterstræde, Kompagnistræde, Studiestræde. Two people wide, and no apology offered. My preferred portion size.
- gade
- The plain word for a street. Half of them still say who worked there: Skindergade for the skinners, Silkegade for silk, Farvergade for the dyers, Vognmagergade for the cartwrights, Møntergade for the mint. A street that names its trade is a street doing its job.
- torv
- A market square, and most of them are named after what was sold on them: Kultorvet for coal, Æggetorvet for eggs, Amagertorv for what the farmers brought over from Amager. Gammeltorv is the old one and Nytorv the new one, and they run straight into each other. A square that tells you what it fed people has my full attention.
- bro
- A bridge. Højbro, Prinsens Bro and Marmorbroen all put you onto the palace island; Nybrogade and Vindebrogade are named after bridges without being any. Nothing on that island can be reached without crossing water first, which was the entire idea.
- ny
- New. Ny Adelgade, Ny Kongensgade, Ny Vestergade, Ny Østergade, Nygade, Nytorv, Nybrogade, and the big square at the east end is the king's new one. Then look for gammel and you get Gammeltorv, Gammel Mønt and Gammel Strand. Everything here is named against something else, and none of it has been new for centuries.
- vold
- A rampart. Only Vester Voldgade and Nørre Voldgade carry it, and those two happen to be exactly where this level stops. The earth is gone. The word is doing the job now.
The size of it
Walk it in a day: Copenhagen in numbers.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 122streets
- 1,474dots
- 24.3km of street
- 30.1km on foot
- 8.5hours at a stroll
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.