The Danish Cornwall that foreign tourists rarely see

Jutland is Denmark’s most northerly region, recommended for travellers seeking peace and quiet - Johner Images/Johner RF

Driving through Jutland after dark, there was a blackness all around – the kind of woolly dark usually achieved only by wearing a sleep mask. My teenage daughter looked out and said, in disbelief, “Where are we?”

The answer was Denmark’s most northerly region, a finger of land pointing across the North and Baltic seas. Perhaps not the first place you might think of for a family holiday – unless, of course, you’re Danish. With its coastal cliffs, fishing industry and sandy beaches, Jutland is a magnet for artists, walkers, birders and gastronomes: it’s the Danish equivalent of Cornwall.

There are also several exciting new attractions, including the first branch of Denmark’s National Gallery (Statens Museum for Kunst, or SMK) outside Copenhagen. Our first destination, however, was Skagen, the fishing town at the peninsula’s northerly tip.

Here, at the edge of wind-whipped dunes, were the welcoming warm lights of our quiet-luxury seaside hotel, Ruths, which has rooms with views, coastal colour schemes, a spa, a pool and a brasserie.

The town’s signature houses are mustard yellow. White lines of mortar edging their orange-red tiles like piped icing, to strengthen the roofs against winter winds. This fishing village began attracting visitors in the 19th century, when the only place to stay was Skagen’s other great hotel, Brondums. It began modestly, with local merchant Erik Brondum opening a few guest rooms, but soon drew illustrious visitors, among them Hans Christian Andersen.

Skagen town is found at the Jutland Peninsula’s northerly tip

Legend has it that Brondum’s wife was so worn down by the writer’s demands that she went into premature labour. The child, Anna Brondum (later Ancher), would become one of Denmark’s most celebrated artists.

We stopped for lunch at Brondums and I saw sunlight cast against a blue wall, just as Anna Ancher painted it. In the dining room, elderly waiters dressed in black and white served the hotel’s famous buttery fish soup. A few minutes’ walk away we found the excellent Skagens Museum, which shows the work of the Skagen Painters group, of which Anna was a part. She and her artist husband later lived nearby, and at their house-turned-museum, with paintings covering every inch of wall, it feels as if they’ve just popped out.

Brondums Hotel was opened by the family of the Danish artist Anna Ancher - Thomas Refsgaard Andersen/Brøndums Hotel

I was already fast recalibrating: Skagen was less Cornwall, more the Danish Hamptons. A glance in an estate agent’s window affirmed that these humble-seeming houses cost millions of kroner. At Ruths’s evening tasting menu, local summer-house owners poured in, dressed to the Danish nines to eat a double-digit number of fantastical courses paired with fine wines.

Despite its popularity with Danish high society, Skagen still feels like a simple place. We saw bearded fishermen who looked as if they’d stepped out of an artwork by the Skagen Painters. We cycled along the pale-sanded coast, where orange flowers blazed in the sturdy grass, reaching where the Sandormen tractor (the Sandworm) takes tourists to Grenen. Just a mile south-west of the town is Den Tilsandede Kirke (the Sand-Buried Church), its tower protruding from the landscape like a forgotten Lego piece.

Leaving Skagen, we drove 20 minutes south to clamber over Rabjerg Mile, a 40m-high migrating dune. Alarmed by advancing sands swallowing coastal buildings, Denmark passed the Sand Drift Act of 1857, mandating planting and other defences. Rabjerg, however, was deliberately spared, and continues its patient journey, advancing some 15m each year.

The Grenen sandbar, found just north of Skagen, provides ample space for a solitary walk - Mette Johnsen/Grenen Skagen

Driving south to Thy, we crossed wetlands on causeways under the Turner-esque sky. It all felt very Lord of the Rings. “You can see why the Vikings had so many sagas,” my husband observed.

Thy is a national park that covers dunes, lakes and marsh. Offshore, it’s known for water sports, especially kitesurfing, and is affectionately called “Cold Hawaii”.

But it was SMK Thy, the new outpost of Denmark’s National Gallery in the hamlet of Doverodde, which had drawn us there. Situated as it is at the remote edge of Thy National Park, we had naively expected to have it all to ourselves: Instead, there was a queue and a palpable buzz. I met with Emilia Nykjaer Isaksson, the curator, who referenced Tate St Ives as an inspiration.

The original SMK, in Copenhagen, has space to show only one per cent of its collection, and so the idea took root to expand beyond the city. This site caught the imagination of all who saw it: a lakeside 19th-century grain farm with an imposing 40m-high 1960s silo.

The new outpost of Denmark’s National Gallery, SMK, is housed in a 19th-century grain farm, complete with architectural gabled roof

Architects Reiulf Ramstad have now repurposed it into a gallery, café and outhouses, which include a Viking boat-building shed. We strolled the lake boardwalks, saw a fraction of SMK’s incredible Post-Impressionist collection in the barn-turned-gallery, then took the lift up the tower for a bird’s eye view over the lake and countryside beyond. As if to boast, a rainbow arched over the water.

From there, it was a two-hour drive east to Aarhus, a sea-facing university city with a cobbled centre, famously good food, and the Gamle By (Old Town), full of reconstructed houses where we spent a whole day wandering through history.

We checked into Roberta’s Society, a repurposed postal headquarters, with views over to the Olafur Eliasson rainbow walkway that tops the Aros art museum. Most excitingly, Aros is building artist James Turrell’s largest museum-centred Skyspace, a Pantheon-like subterranean dome set to open in June.

The Aros art museum in Aarhus features a vibrant rainbow walkway created by Olafur Eliasson

On site with the museum’s director, Rebecca Matthews, I watched the construction, reminiscent of a Viking burial mound. It has been dug to a depth of 16m, she told me, and Turrell has programmed the lighting so the sky will change colour in reaction to the eye, making it unique for each visitor – less like looking at art than being enveloped by it. “It’s more like the sea,” she said. “You inhabit the space of the sky.”

It made an apt metaphor for Jutland. Like its English cousin, this sea-facing peninsula combines wild, working coastlines with a powerful local identity, and a long tradition of artists drawn like moths to the light. Yet it is distinctly Danish: a landscape shaped by wind, where colours are muted and even luxury is unshowy. Long cherished by the Danes, it remains little known outside Denmark. Go, before the rest of the world catches on.

How to do it

Scandinavian flies to Aarhus from London Heathrow; Ryanair does so from London Stansted. Ruths in Skagen has doubles from £270 a night, with breakfast; Roberta’s Society in Aarhus has doubles from £115 a night, room only.

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