You can’t beat great Danes for family fun
FOR a country that tops the UN’s World Happiness Report, Denmark doesn’t get its due credit. Tell people you’re visiting the country and they usually reply: ‘Copenhagen?’ In contrast, mention western Denmark and you’ll get blank faces. But this family-friendly area is fabulous – and even easier to reach thanks to a new BA service to Billund.
Billund is Denmark’s secondlargest airport and just minutes from the original Legoland. This is an area built on plastic bricks – the Lego factory itself is a mile from the theme park.
On the surface, Legoland Billund is similar to the Windsor version, but here there’s a fruit shop and dogs are allowed in. Importantly, queues can be minimal too in summer, helped by the Danish school holidays being in July, not August.
Certainly, it has a kind of calm that’s hard to pull off in a theme park. Stay at the Legoland hotel and you can nip in and out – a resort pass also gets you into Lalandia, the giant water park next door.
Unsurprisingly, Legoland has been the area’s big tourism driver. But with typical Danish co-operation it was an instigator of the Happy Pass in 2013, designed to help smaller local attractions.
Our drive to pretty Vejle, the regional capital, took us along empty roads bisecting countryside crowned by wind turbines.
The landscape is strangely soothing, and it’s difficult to imagine Vikings marauding over this mild, flat land.
One of the biggest collections of old Danish architecture lies north, in Aarhus’s Old Town. By contrast, the city also has ultra-modern gal- lery ARoS, with its fantastic rooftop Rainbow Panorama installation.
The town of Ribe matches Aarhus for historic charm – cobbled streets and squares lined with beamed buildings. We wandered through the fairytale location, fortified by Danish pastries bought by the traditional half-foot measure.
Thanks to its strategic maritime position, Ribe was also once a big Viking base. The sky was glowering at the VikingeCenter village, a reconstruction so compelling that people even spend holidays here, farming and living as medieval Scandinavians.
In the drizzle, the village smelt evocatively of wood-smoke, wet thatch and animals.
Our daughter Claudia wandered through the living spaces, baking bread on a metal spoon and whittling a stick with a lathe. The highlight, though, was warrior-training, where children can learn sword skills, taking on the instructor in mock battles, and fire real arrows from a bow.
If there was an adult version of this, you’d stay all day. We looked on enviously.
Still, we did get to try on a genuine Viking helmet before we ‘pillaged’ the cafe for tea.
A family holiday in Denmark? You won’t be disappointed.