National Museum of Denmark

If you want to understand why Denmark looks and feels the way it does, the National Museum is the place to start. It occupies the Prince's Palace, an eighteenth-century royal residence on Ny Vestergade, a few minutes' walk from Christiansborg and Stroget, and it holds the country's story from the Ice Age reindeer hunters to the welfare state of the twentieth century. The prehistory galleries on the first floor are the reason the museum is famous. Here you meet the Trundholm Sun Chariot, a bronze horse pulling a gilded sun disc, made some three and a half thousand years ago and found by a farmer ploughing a field; the Egtved Girl, a Bronze Age young woman buried in an oak coffin with her clothes still preserved; the Woman from Huldremose, a body some two thousand years old preserved in a peat bog; the silver Gundestrup Cauldron, decorated with gods and animals; and the great bronze lurs, the curved horns that still turn up on Danish butter packets. The Viking galleries follow, with swords, jewellery, runestones and the evidence of raids and trade that took Danes from England to the Caspian. Upstairs, the story continues through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with church art, armour and the domestic life of the absolute monarchy, and then through the modern history of Denmark from 1660 to the present. Other floors hold antiquities from Egypt, Greece and the Near East, ethnographic collections from around the world, and a coin and medal collection whose galleries are currently closed for renovation. Two extras stand out. The Victorian Home is a perfectly preserved upper-class apartment from around 1890, shown on guided visits at weekends, and the Children's Museum, with a Viking ship to climb aboard, a 1930s classroom and a medieval kitchen, is one of the best rainy-day places in Copenhagen for families with younger children. The museum is open from 10:00 to 17:00, every day from April to October and from Tuesday to Sunday the rest of the year, and it is closed on a handful of holidays. Children and young people under 18 enter free, and the Copenhagen Card covers adult entry.

What makes the museum special is that the objects are not reproductions or interpretations but the real finds, many of them famous all over Europe. The Sun Chariot is a national icon, used on banknotes and in school textbooks, and seeing the gold leaf still glinting on the disc after three and a half millennia is genuinely moving. The bog finds are among the best preserved in the world, because the acidic, oxygen-free peat of Danish bogs stops decay; the Huldremose woman still wears her woollen garments. The Golden Horns of Gallehus, two Iron Age gold horns stolen and melted down in 1802, are shown as replicas, and their story is one of the great crime tales of Danish history. In the Viking rooms, look for the runestones and the weapons, and for the displays on everyday life, which correct the horned-helmet myth with the reality of farmers, traders and settlers.

How to visit well: arrive at opening time and go straight to the prehistory galleries, which are the busiest rooms by late morning, then continue to the Vikings before taking a break in the cafe. Two to three hours is enough to see the highlights properly; the museum is large, and trying to see every floor in one visit is tiring. Families should head for the Children's Museum first, as it keeps shorter hours than the main museum, then pick one adult gallery rather than several. Lockers are free, and the building is a good choice when it rains, which in Copenhagen is often. If you want to see the Victorian Home, check the weekend tour times at the information desk when you arrive, as places are limited and the tours are in Danish.

The museum sits at the heart of the old city, so it pairs naturally with the rest of Slotsholmen. Christiansborg Palace, with its royal reception rooms and medieval ruins, is just across the canal, and the departure point for canal tours at Ved Stranden and Nyhavn is a short walk away. The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, with its classical sculpture and French paintings, is about ten minutes to the south-west, near Tivoli. A good day of history in the centre combines the National Museum in the morning, lunch nearby, and Christiansborg or the Round Tower in the afternoon.