Our first day trip was to Helsignor, Elsinore in English. It’s the home of Kronborg Slot, which was Shakespeare’s inspiration for Hamlet’s castle, but as you can imagine, it’s really something fairly different.
Helsingor sits on the Oresund, the strait between Denmark and Sweden, at its narrowest point. There used to be a toll charged here, so Kronborg has its roots in defense of that.
It’s a very imposing place – you can see it looming on the horizon from the train station. The grounds are a public park, so you can wander the shoreline for free.
They had a fun exhibition inside about how the kings liked to party at Kronborg – apparently Christian IV was well known for his parties, which may be why Shakespeare had heard of Elsinore. You can also go into what they call the Casements – or the underground passages that were used for defense. The statues of Holger the Dane is down there.
We had a lovely conversation with one of the guides, who initially confused us greatly by telling us we had to go out and see the “can-noons”. It took us far too long to figure out she was talking about the cannons, but we agreed we might just like that pronunciation better.
On the way back to the train station, we stopped by to see this statue of Hercules and the Hydra that’s situated at the mouth of the harbor.
We’d initially kicked around the idea of hopping on the ferry to Sweden, just to say we had. (We could have also taken the train over from Copenhagen.) We spent enough time in the castle that I’m glad we didn’t. We really wouldn’t have gotten enough out of the hop over to make it worth it.