Kastellet, the Citadel

The fort

Christian IV started it in 1626 as St. Anne's Redoubt. The Dutch engineer Henrik Rüse rebuilt it as a pentagonal citadel with five bastions, dated 30 October 1664, and that shape is still legible from the air and from the ramparts. It has been continuously in military hands since, and on 9 April 1940 German troops walked into it without resistance.

The prison

The part visitors do not expect is that this was a place of confinement. Struensee waited here for the execution of 28 April 1772, at which his right hand was severed before he was beheaded, drawn and quartered. The English explorer John Norcross was held at Kastellet for thirty-two years, sixteen of them in a wooden cage. Thirty-two years is longer than most Danish reigns, and sixteen of them in a box is the single most disturbing fact on this site that involves no ghost at all.

Walking it

The ramparts are grass and gravel and the ground is uneven, which matters if you are planning a day on foot — see the access page and how walkable the city is. No walk on this site goes to Kastellet; the English ghost walk covers the centre in an hour and a half from Nytorv, and the self-guided Amalienborg hunt works the streets between the Pier and Lille Sandstræde: the Amalienborg hunt.

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