Destination: Helsingør, Denmark

Kronborg Castle in Helsingør (June 2025)

Besides visiting Copenhagen and the Faroe Islands, my partner and I also spent half a day visiting the city of Helsingør. Also known as “Elsinore,” this coastal city serves daily ferries through the Øresund Strait, between Denmark and Sweden. Helsingør is also historically-known as the setting for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and we spent some time exploring the Kronborg where much of the play took place.

Established back in the 1420s, Helsingør was built for maritime trade and as a result grew over the centuries. The Kronborg Castle was commissioned around the same period and later expanded in the 1570s. Helsingør’s port was especially vital during the Second World War, when the Danes assisted in smuggling over 7,200 Jews across the Øresund Strait to seek asylum in neighboring Sweden.

My partner and I had booked a day tour to Helsingør and Sweden (more on the latter to come soon) and left early in the morning to get to our meeting point on time. It turned out to be a bus tour with over 40-50 passengers, partly with commentary from the driver-guide and partly from pre-recorded audio, which we listened to through earbuds.

Any case, we spent 45 minutes driving through the beautiful Danish countryside (so green in the summer!) before reaching Helsingør by 10h30. From there, our guide gave us two and a half hours to either explore Kronborg or the city itself. My partner and I opted to visit the former, as we were both English majors and have read many of Shakespeare’s works, Hamlet included. Admission was pretty hefty at 150 DKK ($23 USD) per person, but our tickets allowed us to visit both the ramparts outside and the castle inside.

Entrance to Kronborg

Kronborg was big and spacious, and even though we didn’t see all that there was to it during our visit, we covered a lot of ground and hit many of the highlights, including the Great Hall, the Royal Apartments (where King Frederick II of the mid-16th century resided), the Chapel, and the statue of Holger the Dane, a knight of Charlemagne in the 11th century and considered protector of the castle grounds. The architecture inside the rooms were more-modest than extravagant ones I’ve seen in châteaux in France, England, or Austria, but still elegant and lovely to admire. In the end, I also climbed the Clock Tower to get panoramic views of Helsingør, as well as the deep-blue Øresund Strait.

King’s Room

The Great Hall

Holger the Dane statue

Views of the Kronborg courtyard from the clock tower

Views of Helsingør from the clock tower

Following our visit, we still had about a half-hour to kill before we had to return to the bus. That said, we checked out a food hall called Værftets Madmarked, located near the castle and featured many food stalls with cuisines from all over the world. My partner got a falafel wrap while I tried my hand at flæskesteg, a Danish roast pork dish, which I had in sandwich form. Paired with fries, it was a hearty, decent meal!

Flæskesteg with fries

That concluded our time in Helsingør, and we soon left around 13h00 in order to catch the next ferry over to Sweden, which due to a few stragglers getting back on the bus, we ended up missing and had to wait for the next one. Frankly, it was a lousy tour, as it was fast-paced and also unreasonable. We were given practically no time to eat or use the bathroom, and it didn’t help that we were visiting Sweden during Midsommar, when 90% of shops were closed. Our guide wasn’t the friendliest, either, as he kept hurrying us up and getting mad when a few passengers were three (3!!!) minutes late to the bus following our time in Helsingør.

Honestly, my partner and I were fed up with the tour and, once we took the ferry over to Sweden, we notified our guide that we were basically ditching the tour to explore Lund (the following city), and we would just take the train back to Copenhagen by ourselves. This was the first time I’d ever abandoned a tour, but given that we’d paid $220 USD each for crappy service, we were dissatisfied with the quality of it and decided it’d be better if we just visited Sweden on our own. It turned out to be a good decision in the end!

All the same, I will recap our time in Sweden in the next post. Stay tuned! 🙂

— Rebecca