Copenhagen is a land of fairytales.

It is a land of kings and queens, renaissance castles and white horses, jutting cobblestones, medieval towers, and looming narrow alleyways unchanged from days of old. There is a smell to it, too, though I’ve yet to place it. A sweet smell, swirling with tastes of the ocean, baked bread, musty library books, burnt sugar. There is something in the air that sets your imagination ablaze. Its royalty must have felt it, too. It’s the sort of feeling that if anything can be dreamed, it can be realized. (And, in the monarchy’s case, with the right amount of bank).

Rosenborg Slot (dkks.dk), a castle worthy of picture books.

With an interior as colorful as dreams.

The castle garden, fit for royal strolls.

And a Royal Treasury protecting jewels too bright and beautiful to be clearly captured.

Though capturing the castle is easy enough 🙂 (Oh hey, look, I actually am in Copenhagen!)

Then, today, I paid respects to the royal family by visiting Christiansborg Palace, on the islet of Slotsholmen. It’s the fifth (fifth!) palace to be built here, after the destruction of time and fires that ravaged the others (two other Christiansborgs being the most recent).

Since rooms are still used by HM the Queen, visitors are required to wear “booties” so as not the soil the floor.

Of course, no fairytale castle comes without a sweeping, illuminated, white-with-gilded-gold grand staircase…

…ambient-lit piano room…

…library distinctly reminiscent of Beauty and the Beast…

…or, to pull those heavy ceremonial carriages, a gorgeously white-speckled herd of horses. (This one’s for you, Mom!)

Yes, a land of fairytales indeed. A fairytale, that is, of course, reserved specially for the royal family and those of us that can still live vicariously through our own imaginations. And helped, no doubt, with a little bit of magic from a true king of Denmark: Hans Christian Andersen.