Nyhavn

This canal was dug out by hand, and it is worth knowing who did it. Christian V started the work in 1670. The men standing in the mud digging were Danish soldiers and Swedish prisoners of war, taken in a war the king had just lost. It took five years. The idea was to let ships sail right up to Kongens Nytorv so cargo could be unloaded in the middle of town. It worked. And the result was not the colours you see now. For two hundred years this was the harbour quarter, with everything that comes with one: taverns, tattoo parlours, brothels and sailors coming ashore with wages in their pockets. Respectable people did not come here. They did not send their daughters here. And in the middle of all that lived Hans Christian Andersen. He kept rooms at number 67 from 1845 to 1864, and later at number 18 until he died in 1875. Eighteen years in all, in the part of town with the worst reputation. The man who wrote the fairy tales children grow up with all over the world wrote them looking out at a harbour full of drunk sailors. The ships went after the war, the canal sat half empty, and it was only from the 1960s that the cafés and the colours arrived. The houses on the sunny side date from the late seventeenth century. The oldest of them are as old as the canal.