Copenhagen

Settled as a Viking fishing village in the tenth century near what is now Gammel Strand, Copenhagen became Denmark’s capital in the early fifteenth century and, in the sixteenth, the de facto capital of the Kalmar Union, the seat of a monarchy governing most of the Nordic region. Plague and fire hit it hard in the eighteenth century, and the rebuilding gave it Frederiksstaden, the Royal Theatre and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. A British fleet bombarded the city in 1807. It sits mainly on Zealand with a part on Amager, and the Øresund Bridge carries road and rail to Malmö.