Spires, Domes & Crumbs

Settle into your accommodation and get your bearings. The old city is compact enough to walk almost everywhere over the next three days.

Start the trip as every good Copenhagen day should: with something laminated and buttery. Andersen Bakery is a proper Danish institution, and the morning light through the window is reason enough to linger over a second coffee.

The defining image of the Christianshavn skyline: a baroque tower whose external staircase corkscrews upward in a golden helix. Climb it on a clear morning and the city fans out below you in every direction — water, copper rooftops, and the flat green of Amager beyond.

Cross the canal to Slotsholmen and step inside the vivid ochre-and-terracotta tomb-museum of Denmark's greatest sculptor. The building itself — painted inside like a Pompeian villa — is as arresting as the marble friezes it contains.

A short walk from Slotsholmen, this old-school Danish lunch house is exactly what you want after a morning of marble and baroque towers: open-faced smørrebrød, cold aquavit if the mood calls for it, and absolutely no fuss.

Just steps from the canal, the old Stock Exchange is crowned by four intertwined dragon tails spiralling into the sky — Copenhagen's other great spire, and a visual bookend to the morning's climb. The exterior is as theatrical as any church in the city.

Follow the canal north to Nyhavn's famous painted townhouses. The colours photograph brilliantly in afternoon light, and the quayside is a fine place to decompress before the evening.

On Gammel Strand — the old fishing quay — Krog's has been serving serious Danish seafood for generations. Order whatever is freshest and watch the last light fade over the water through the tall windows.

Day two opens at 20 Grams, one of the city's most photogenic coffee stops. Pull up a stool, order a flat white and something from the pastry shelf, and plan the marble-dome morning ahead.

Copenhagen's Lutheran cathedral is a study in neoclassical restraint: pale stone, wide nave, and Thorvaldsen's monumental Christ presiding over the apse. After yesterday's baroque excess, the calm here is almost physical.

A twenty-minute walk east through the Frederiksstaden grid brings you to the Marble Church, whose dome — modelled loosely on St Peter's in Rome — is the widest in Scandinavia. On weekday mornings the interior is nearly empty, and the acoustics are extraordinary.

Double back toward Kongens Nytorv to visit Charlottenborg, the baroque palace that now houses the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts' exhibition spaces. Whatever is showing, the painted halls and the courtyard alone justify the detour.

Head to the covered market hall for some of the most honest open-faced sandwiches in the city. The rye is dense and dark, the toppings seasonal, and the queue moves fast enough to be exciting.

Denmark's national gallery holds everything from Dutch Golden Age masters to a superb collection of Danish Golden Age painting — Eckersberg, Købke, Lundbye. The modern wing connects seamlessly, so you can drift between centuries without a seam.

Just across the park from SMK, Rosenborg's turreted Dutch Renaissance silhouette is one of the city's great photo subjects. The Crown Jewels are in the basement; the King's Garden outside is perfect for a slow late-afternoon loop.

Wind down the day at Ølbaren, a bar that takes Danish and Scandinavian craft beer seriously without taking itself too seriously. A good place to rest your legs and debrief on two days of spires.

Dinner in the glass greenhouse interior of Vækst — a restaurant built around vegetables and Nordic produce. The setting alone, all trailing greenery under a soaring atrium, makes this the visual high point of the evening.

The third morning calls for a proper neighbourhood bakery before heading north. Holms Bager delivers: cardamom buns, rye loaves cooling on the rack, and a coffee to go if the bus is calling.

Take the S-tog or bus north toward Bispebjerg. The journey through the residential neighbourhoods is a reminder that Copenhagen extends well beyond the tourist centre.

Nothing in Copenhagen prepares you for Grundtvig's. Designed by P.V. Jensen-Klint and completed in 1940, the church is built entirely from millions of yellow bricks arranged in a colossal organ-pipe facade. The interior — vast, stripped-back, luminous — is the most powerful sacred space in the city. Save time to simply sit.

Back in the inner city, the Botanical Garden offers a Victorian palm house and beautifully arranged outdoor beds. It is the right kind of gentle after a morning of monumental brick.

Tuck into lunch at Søcafeen, a waterside café with an easy, unhurried atmosphere — exactly what a final afternoon in Copenhagen should feel like.

A quieter, older chapter in Copenhagen's church story: Holmen was the royal naval church, its dark oak pews carved by craftsmen who usually built ships. Admirals and seafarers are buried beneath the floor, and the anchor hanging in the nave says everything about this city's relationship with the sea.

A short walk from Holmen, the Gefion Fountain is one of Scandinavia's largest bronze sculptures — a Norse goddess driving four oxen through crashing water. The setting, with the harbour behind it, makes for a strong final photograph of the trip.

Close the trip at ferment, where the kitchen's obsession with preservation, pickling and slow transformation produces food that tastes distinctly of this part of the world. A fitting last meal for a city that rewards patience and close attention.