Three days in Aalborg: a Viking burial ground on one bank, and the loudest street in Denmark on the other

Two nights on the Limfjord in northern Jutland: seven hundred graves under a hillside of heather, two Renaissance merchant houses on the main street, and a white modernist harbour front.

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Length
3 days, 2 nights
Where you stay
Aalborg
Places
8 across 3 days
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Aalborg sits where the Limfjord, the strait that slices right across the top of Jutland from the North Sea to the Kattegat, is at its narrowest. That crossing is why anybody settled here, why the Vikings buried their dead on the ridge above it, and why the town got rich on herring, grain and later on cement and aquavit. It is Denmark's fourth city and for a long time it was the industrial one, which meant nobody wrote about it much.

That has changed in the last twenty years, mostly along the water. The docks and the cement works have gone and the harbour front is now a promenade with a concert hall on it and the last building Jørn Utzon designed, put up in the town he grew up in and finished the year he died. There is a good Alvar Aalto museum on the other side of the centre. And there is Jomfru Ane Gade, a single short street with something like twenty bars on it, which is the thing Danes will mention first if you tell them where you are going.

Three days is enough for all of it, and the reason to stay rather than pass through is on the far bank of the fjord: Lindholm Høje, a hillside covered in Iron Age and Viking graves marked out with stones in the shape of ships, buried by drifting sand around 1200 and dug out again in the twentieth century almost exactly as it was left.

Highlights

  • Around seven hundred burials on open ground, many of them outlined in stones set in the shape of a ship
  • A five storey Renaissance house whose owner put a rude stone face on the back wall, aimed at the council
  • An art museum designed by Alvar Aalto, in a marble box in a wood
  • The last building Jorn Utzon designed, on the harbour of the city he was raised in
  • A half timbered royal castle whose casemates you can walk into for nothing

Where to stay

Aalborg, two nights

Almost anywhere central works. The area between the cathedral and the harbour puts you within a few minutes of everything here, and being on Jomfru Ane Gade itself is a decision you make once and regret between two and four in the morning at weekends.

Two nights gives one afternoon to the old town, one full day to the Viking site and the art museum, and a last morning on the water.

Day by day

Day 1 in Aalborg

Merchants' houses, a cathedral and a castle courtyard

Aalborg's old core is four or five streets and it is best done as one slow walk. Start at Budolfi, the cathedral, a brick church begun in the 1300s on the site of an older wooden one, with a Baroque spire added later that is the shape everybody in the city draws when they draw the town. Inside it is white, plain and small for a cathedral, because Aalborg only got a bishop in 1554 when the Reformation reorganised everything.

Two minutes away on Østerågade is Jens Bangs Stenhus, a five storey Renaissance merchant's house finished in 1624 and one of the largest of its kind left in northern Europe. Jens Bang was the richest man in town, was repeatedly refused a seat on the council, and had a stone face carved into the rear elevation sticking its tongue out towards the town hall. It is still there and it is still doing it. A hundred metres north stands an older and lower merchant's house from 1616, with the warehouse doors still set in its gable.

Finish at Aalborghus, which is a castle in the Danish sense: a half timbered courtyard building put up between 1539 and 1555 by Christian III as a fortification and tax office, of which only the east wing is original. There is no public access to the rooms, but the courtyard is open and free, and so are the underground casemates, which run under the ramparts and are unlit enough to be worth doing.

The evening belongs to Jomfru Ane Gade if you want it. Two hundred metres, roughly twenty bars, extremely cheap and extremely young. Everybody in Denmark knows what it is.

  1. 15:00

    Budolfi Church

    Religious

    Aalborg's cathedral, medieval, whitewashed and smaller than the spire suggests. Free, central, and twenty minutes is enough.

  2. 15:45

    Jens Bangs Stenhus

    Architecture

    A merchant's house from 1624, five storeys of carved stone on the main street. Look at the back wall for the face pulling an expression at the town hall opposite.

  3. 16:45

    Aalborghus Castle

    Other

    A half timbered royal castle from the 1540s. The rooms are closed but the courtyard and the underground casemates are free and open long hours.

  4. 18:30

    Dinner near the harbour

    Eat

    The waterfront between the castle and the concert hall has the better restaurants, and prices in northern Jutland are noticeably kinder than in Copenhagen.

With more time: Jørgen Olufsen's house on Østerågade predates Jens Bang's by eight years and is considerably less showy, which was probably the point. The old wet market square behind the main street is where Aalborg buys fish on a Saturday morning.

Day 2 in Aalborg

Seven hundred graves, and an art museum in a wood

Lindholm Høje is on the ridge above the north bank of the fjord and is one of the largest burial grounds of its period in Scandinavia. Around seven hundred graves have been found here, in use from the fifth century through the Viking Age, and a great many of them are marked out on the ground with stones set in the outline of a ship. Standing among them, with the fjord below and nothing much else on the hill, is a strange experience and not a museum one.

The reason it survived is sand. The hill was farmed until drifting dunes buried the site and the village beside it around 1200, and the sand sealed everything, including the plough marks in the fields, until excavation in the 1950s. The museum at the bottom of the hill holds the finds and explains the layers, and the reconstruction of the field system is more interesting than that sounds.

Go in the morning, allow two and a half hours for both, and walk back over the Limfjord bridge if the weather permits.

In the afternoon, KUNSTEN. Alvar Aalto won the competition for Aalborg's art museum in 1958 with his wife Elissa and a Danish architect, and the building opened in 1972: white marble, top lighting through curved louvres, a sculpture park around it and a wood behind. It is one of only a handful of Aalto buildings outside Finland and it is the reason to go, though the Danish modern collection inside is decent in its own right.

  1. 10:00

    Lindholm Høje

    Historic

    Around seven hundred Viking and Iron Age graves on an open hillside, many outlined as stone ships. Free, always open, and better in hard weather than in sunshine.

  2. 11:45

    Lindholm Høje museum

    Culture

    The finds from the hill, the buried field system and the story of the sand that preserved it. At the foot of the site, with a restaurant.

  3. 13:30

    Lunch back in town

    Eat

    The museum restaurant at the burial ground is the convenient option. The better one is to eat late in the centre on the way to the art museum.

  4. 14:30

    KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art Aalborg

    Culture

    Alvar Aalto's only museum outside Finland, in white marble with a sculpture park around it. Fifteen minutes from the centre on foot, and the building is the exhibit.

With more time: The observation tower on the wooded hill directly behind the art museum was built of lattice steel in 1933, stands fifty five metres high on ground that is already fifty above the fjord, and has a restaurant at the top. It is five minutes' walk and gives you the whole city, the water and the ships.

Day 3 in Aalborg

Utzon's last building, and a monastery under the street

The Utzon Center is on the harbour front, five minutes from the station, and it is the last thing Jørn Utzon designed. He grew up in Aalborg, where his father was a naval architect, spent his career on the Sydney Opera House and the fights around it, and came back at the end of his life to build this with his son Kim. It opened in 2008 and he died a few months later. It is a low group of white blocks under sweeping roofs of different heights, with a boatyard at one end that was there because Utzon wanted the sound of somebody working with wood in the building. There are exhibitions on architecture and design and a very good café.

Then walk two minutes into the middle of the shopping street and go down a staircase in the pavement. Underneath Algade are the excavated foundations of a Franciscan friary, preserved in situ three metres below the modern surface, with a burial vault, a well and part of the medieval market. It was found in the 1990s when the department store above was being rebuilt, and the museum built round it is small, dark and unexpectedly good.

The station is ten minutes from either.

  1. 10:00

    Utzon Centre

    Culture

    Utzon's final design, on the Aalborg waterfront. Architecture and design exhibitions, a working boatyard inside and a café worth the visit alone.

  2. 12:00

    Gråbrødrekloster Museum

    Culture

    A Franciscan friary excavated in place three metres under the main shopping street, entered down a stair in the pavement. Small, strange and half an hour.

With more time: Aalborg has distilled aquavit since the nineteenth century and the name is on bottles all over Scandinavia. If you would rather leave with something in a bag, the caraway version is the local one and every supermarket sells it for a fraction of what a bar charges.

Before you go

Getting in

Trains from Copenhagen take about four and a half hours and from Aarhus an hour and twenty minutes. The station is at the southern edge of the centre, ten minutes' walk from the main street and fifteen from the water.

Aalborg airport is six kilometres north west, on the far side of the fjord, with a train from the terminal into the city in about ten minutes. There are frequent flights from Copenhagen and a scattering of European routes.

By car it is on the E45 and roughly two hours from Hamburg's side of the border. Ferries from Norway and Sweden dock at Hirtshals and Frederikshavn, both about an hour north.

Getting around

The centre is small, flat and walkable, and the old town, the cathedral, the castle and the harbour are all inside fifteen minutes of each other.

For Lindholm Høje, buses cross the bridge from the centre and take about fifteen minutes, or you can walk it in forty over the Limfjord bridge, which is a good walk in itself with the fjord traffic underneath.

Aalborg is a cycling city in the ordinary Danish way and hire is cheap. The path along the south bank of the fjord runs for kilometres in both directions.

When to go

May to September. Northern Jutland gets more wind than the rest of Denmark and the summers are cooler, but the harbour front, the fjord path and the beaches an hour away all need decent weather to make sense.

The Aalborg Carnival at the end of May is the largest in northern Europe, which sounds unlikely until you see twenty five thousand people in costume come through the middle of the city. It is entirely home grown and has nothing to do with Lent.

Winter is dark, wet and windy, and the museums, the underground monastery and the bars carry it perfectly well. Lindholm Høje is bleak and rather better in that weather, if you dress for it.

Aalborg is a working city that has quietly acquired some very good buildings, and the two ends of it are three kilometres and a thousand years apart: stone ships on a windy hill, and a white modernist harbour front by the man who built the Sydney Opera House.

Walk over the bridge rather than taking the bus, and go up to the graves in bad weather.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

Is Aalborg worth three days?
Two nights is the honest answer for most people, which is what this covers. The old town is an afternoon, Lindholm Høje and the art museum are a day, and the harbour is a morning. If you want longer, the extra day goes to Skagen or the west coast beaches rather than to more of the city.
Aalborg or Aarhus?
Aarhus is the bigger city with the better museums and would be the choice if you can only do one. Aalborg is smaller, cheaper, has the Viking site and the Aalto building, and is the natural base for the top of Jutland. They are eighty minutes apart by train, so doing both is easy.
What is at Skagen?
The northern tip of Denmark, an hour and a half away by train, where the North Sea and the Baltic meet on a spit of sand and you can stand with a foot in each. There is a famous colony of nineteenth century painters, a church buried to its tower in a dune, and yellow houses with red roofs everywhere. It is the best day trip from here by a distance.
How wild is Jomfru Ane Gade?
On a Friday or Saturday in term time, very. It is two hundred metres of bars aimed squarely at students, drinks are cheap by Danish standards and it runs until the small hours. Midweek and out of term it is quiet enough to walk down without noticing. Choose your hotel accordingly.
Do I need to book anything?
No. Lindholm Høje is free and open at all hours, the castle courtyard and casemates are free, and the museums here do not sell out. The only thing worth planning ahead is a room during the carnival at the end of May, when the city fills.