Look to your right for a massive yellow brick building topped with a steep red tile roof and endless rows of crisp white windows. This is the Royal Life Guard Barracks, though its origins are surprisingly botanical. King Christian the Fifth built a garden pavilion here in sixteen seventy. King Frederik the Fourth later expanded it into an orangery, a heated greenhouse for exotic citrus trees, in seventeen zero nine. In seventeen eighty-six, the military took over, trading delicate lemon trees for armed soldiers.
The most intense chapter here unfolded during World War Two. On the twenty-ninth of August, nineteen forty-three, German forces attacked the barracks at four in the morning. The Danish guards refused to fold. Two hundred men fiercely returned fire from the drill square and directly out of these windows. The shootout only stopped when the Life Guard commander arrived to order a ceasefire, ending a battle that left two Danish soldiers dead. Today, the building holds a military museum, though you must politely ask the armed guard at the gate for entry.
It remains a formidable piece of Danish history. Whenever you are ready, we can continue to our next stop.
