Central Denmark

Aarhus is small enough to walk across and large enough to have a real cultural life, and the past twenty years have been spent making the most of that. The art museum on the hill is the landmark — a solid brick cube topped by a circular glass walkway in the full spectrum of colours, so that walking its ring tints the whole city through a different shade each few steps. Down at the water, a redeveloped harbour district has replaced container yards with apartments, a striking public library and waterfront swimming. Two museums do the historical work: an open-air town rebuilt from relocated period buildings, where the streets are staffed and staged by decade rather than simply preserved, and a modern museum built into a grassy slope you can walk over the roof of, holding the region's prehistoric collections. The student population keeps the food and music scenes moving all year rather than seasonally.

Inland from Aarhus, around Silkeborg, is the closest thing Denmark has to highlands — a chain of connected lakes, forested ridges and the country's longest river, all left behind by the last ice age. The famous summit reaches about 147 metres, which was enough for the nineteenth century to name it the Sky Mountain and enough for Danes to keep calling it that with entirely straight faces. The point is not altitude. The point is that this is the one part of the country designed for canoeing and multi-day paddling, with a river system you can follow for days, historic lake steamers still running the water in summer, and forest trails that actually climb. It is also, quietly, one of the best cycling areas in Denmark precisely because the terrain has some shape to it.

The peat bogs of central Jutland do something unusual to organic material: the cold, acid, oxygen-poor water tans and preserves it, and in the twentieth century local peat cutters twice uncovered a body so intact that police were called before archaeologists were. Both proved to be roughly two thousand years old. One, in the museum at Silkeborg, is famous for his face — eyes closed, a slight crease at the mouth, an expression so composed that photographs of him are among the most reproduced images in archaeology. The other, at the museum outside Aarhus, is remarkable for the preservation of hair, skin and fingernails. Both men died violently, most likely as ritual killings, which is stated plainly on the displays and is part of what they tell us about Iron Age belief. Seeing either is a genuinely strange and quiet experience, and the two museums are close enough to do in a single day.

East of Aarhus the land runs out into Djursland, a broad peninsula with a glacial hill landscape at its southern end that is protected as a national park — moraine ridges, heath, grazed hills and a coastline of small bays, all of it walkable and none of it strenuous. Ebeltoft, the old market town on that coast, keeps a preserved centre of crooked half-timbered streets and a nineteenth-century wooden frigate in its harbour. Further round, the peninsula is family holiday country, with beaches, summer houses and a set of large attractions that pull Danish families through the season. It is the part of the region that fills up in July and goes quiet the rest of the year, and it works best as a two- or three-day extension from an Aarhus base rather than as a destination in itself.