Look to your right to spot the expansive green lawns bounded by low brick walls, creating a vast approach to a striking red brick palace crowned with tall green copper spires.
Welcome to Kongens Have, or The King's Garden, the oldest and most visited park in central Copenhagen. Because even a king needs an impressive backyard. Back in sixteen oh six, King Christian the Fourth bought land just outside the city ramparts to build a Renaissance style pleasure garden. Now, a Renaissance garden was highly practical, focusing on geometric order and active cultivation. It essentially served as a royal grocery store, supplying mulberries, wine grapes, apples, and lavender directly to the royal household. Over the decades, the modest pavilion sitting on these grounds was expanded into the massive Rosenborg Castle standing before you.
As European fashions shifted, the garden received a major architectural upgrade. By sixteen sixty-nine, records show the addition of a complex garden maze leading to an octagonal summerhouse, a classic feature of the new Baroque style. Baroque landscapes were all about rigid symmetry and showing nature exactly who was boss. In seventeen eleven, a visionary head gardener named Johan Cornelius Krieger took over and fully committed to this aesthetic. He laid out the twelve hectare park in a strict grid pattern, cutting through it with two dominant diagonal avenues lined with lime trees. One is known as the Knight's Path, and the other is the Lady's Path, intersecting perfectly near the center of the park.
Tucked among this engineered greenery is a rather petty piece of public art. Commissioned in sixteen seventeen, the oldest sculpture here is called The Horse and the Lion. It depicts a lion with a strangely humanoid face viciously tearing down a horse. Officially, it is a copy of an antique Roman sculpture representing the mythical battle between light and darkness. Unofficially? It was a monumental passive aggressive jab. Christian the Fourth was absolutely furious at his cousin for failing to send military backup during the disastrous Battle of Lutter in sixteen twenty-six. So, the king used this statue to vent his frustrations, with the victorious lion representing the Danish coat of arms, and the dying horse representing his cousin's territory.
If you trace the perimeter of the garden, you will notice a neat wrought iron grill incorporating small shop pavilions. After the devastating Copenhagen Fire of seventeen ninety-five, City Architect Peter Meyn needed to create a beautiful barrier for the newly built residential streets. Heavily inspired by the bustling merchant bridges of Paris, he designed these small neoclassical structures. They were built exactly six ells wide and six ells high, an ell being an old measurement of about two feet. Merchants originally sold cakes and stockings out of them, and today they are still rented out for contemporary art and design.
If you want to explore the grounds, the park is open every day from seven in the morning until ten at night.
Take a moment to appreciate this grand horticultural flex before we move forward.
