Kronborg Castle

Shakespeare called it Elsinore, and Hamlet has been attached to it ever since, but the castle was built for a blunter reason: the Øresund is only four kilometres wide here, and Eric of Pomerania put a fortress called Krogen on the point in the 1420s so that no ship could enter or leave the Baltic without paying him. Frederick II turned that fortress into a Renaissance castle between 1574 and 1585. Fire gutted it in 1629, the Swedes took it and its art in 1658, and from 1785 it served as army barracks until 1923. UNESCO listed it in 2000.