Danish crime series: visiting the real locations in Copenhagen

The Killing, Borgen, The Bridge, and The Chestnut Man were all filmed on location in Copenhagen. The streets, the palaces, and the harbour you watched on screen are real, open, and worth seeing in a different light.

Copenhagen has always earned its place on a Nordic itinerary. The food, the design, the scale of the city, the particular quality of light off the harbour in summer and the low winter skies: these are reasons enough to go. But over the past two decades, the city has acquired an additional layer of meaning for a certain kind of traveller, one who arrived in Copenhagen already knowing its streets, its politics, and its detectives, through some of the most compelling television drama produced anywhere in the world.
If you have watched The Killing, The Bridge, Borgen, or The Chestnut Man, you have already spent considerable time in Copenhagen. The question is whether you recognised it.

The locations

The Killing, known in Danish as Forbrydelsen, made Detective Sarah Lund one of the most recognisable fictional figures of the 2010s. The series was filmed almost entirely on location, and its Copenhagen is the real one. Christiansborg Palace, which dominates the second season as the seat of Danish political power, is open to visitors and remains one of the most atmospheric buildings in the city. The palace tower, at 106 metres the tallest in Copenhagen, is free to climb, and from the top you can look out over the same roofline that forms the backdrop to much of the series. The police headquarters at Politigården, where Lund works, is a short walk away in the Vesterbro district.

Borgen, which follows Denmark's first female prime minister through three seasons of coalition politics and moral compromise, is set almost entirely within Christiansborg and the streets around it. The building functions as both location and argument in the series: a place of power that simultaneously constrains and reveals the people who work inside it. Season four, Power & Glory, extends the story to Greenland, but the Copenhagen of the first three seasons is entirely walkable. (But if Greenland has caught your attention, we have journeys in Greenland too.

The Bridge opens on the Øresund Bridge connecting Copenhagen to Malmö, where a body is found at the exact midpoint between the two countries. The bridge is real, the crossing takes around 20 minutes by train from Copenhagen Airport to Malmö central station, and it carries a different quality of attention once you know the series. Amager Beach Park, on the Copenhagen side, offers a direct view of the bridge from the Danish shore. Our Malmö and Malmö Bridge pages cover the Swedish side of the story in more detail.

The Chestnut Man, created by Søren Sveistrup, the same writer behind The Killing, is a more recent Netflix thriller set across Copenhagen's quieter residential suburbs and surrounding forested countryside rather than its monumental centre. The locations are less immediately recognisable than those of The Killing or Borgen, but the series draws on the same quality of Copenhagen autumn light and the particular unease of ordinary places placed under extraordinary pressure.

For a broader guide to the books, films, and series set across the Nordic region, and the real places behind them, read our full article: The places that inspired the stories.

Visiting the locations

Copenhagen's filming locations are not a curated trail with signage and audio guides. They are simply the city itself, going about its business. Christiansborg is open to visitors year-round. The old harbour, Nyhavn, and the canals that appear across all of these series are best explored on foot or by boat. The city is compact enough that a morning's walking connects most of the significant locations.

Planning your visit

Any of our Copenhagen and Denmark packages can be combined with a tailor-made tour of filming locations, arranged through our local Copenhagen guide. Whether you are joining us on a city break, a broader Denmark itinerary, or a longer Scandinavian journey that includes Copenhagen, we can incorporate the locations that matter to you into your time in the city.

Our guide's knowledge of the city extends well beyond the filming locations themselves. The series that made Copenhagen internationally famous did so by showing a city that was real rather than idealised, and that quality is still there in the streets, the light, and the pace of the place. It is best encountered with someone who knows it well.

Get in touch to start planning your Copenhagen visit.