Aarhus, the Viking harbour that became an art city

Aarhus takes its name, more or less unchanged, from Aros, Old Norse for river mouth, a description that has held true since the settlement's earliest days as a fortified Viking-age trading post at the point where the Aarhus River meets the bay. Archaeological excavations beneath the modern city centre have uncovered traces of a defensive rampart and street layout dating to around the tenth century, evidence of a settlement that was, by the standards of the period, a genuine trading town rather than a simple fishing village, exchanging goods along Viking trade routes that reached across the Baltic and beyond.

A harbour that kept trading long after the Vikings

Aarhus grew steadily through the medieval period into one of Denmark's principal provincial towns, its harbour continuing to handle trade long after the Viking age itself had passed into history, and the city's cathedral, Aarhus Domkirke, begun in the thirteenth century, remains the longest church in Denmark, a scale that reflects the city's medieval importance as an ecclesiastical as much as a commercial centre. Aarhus today is Denmark's second-largest city after Copenhagen and home to one of the country's largest universities, a combination of old trading harbour and modern academic centre that gives the city a notably younger, livelier character than its long history might otherwise suggest.

A Viking town rebuilt for visitors, brick by brick

Den Gamle By, an open-air museum on the edge of the city centre, takes a rather literal approach to preserving Aarhus's history: rather than leave old buildings in place, the museum has relocated more than seventy historic buildings from towns across Denmark, reassembled into a functioning recreation of a Danish market town across several historical periods, from the seventeenth century through to the more recent past. It is one of the oldest open-air museums of its kind in the world, and it sits alongside a separate, more recent focus on the city's earliest history: excavated Viking-age remains are displayed at several sites around the modern centre, giving a direct link between the rampart Aarhus's earliest traders built and the streets a visitor walks today.

A rainbow on the roof

The city's most photographed modern landmark could hardly look less like a Viking rampart. ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, the city's principal art museum, is topped by Your Rainbow Panorama, a circular glass walkway installed by the artist Olafur Eliasson in 2011, its glazing running through the full spectrum of the visible colour range so that visitors walking the full circuit see the city below through every colour in turn. The installation has become, in little more than a decade, as recognisable a symbol of Aarhus as anything from its much longer history, a reminder that a city built on a Viking river mouth has kept finding new things to be known for in the thousand-plus years since.

Calling at Aarhus

Ambassador's Nordic Neighbours: A Journey Through Sweden & Denmark, seven nights from London Tilbury, calls at Aarhus alongside Gothenburg, Copenhagen and Aalborg, giving a broad look at both countries' coasts on a single sailing.

Fred. Olsen's Scandinavian Waterways: Way of Life, ten nights from Newcastle, pairs Aarhus with Stockholm on a longer route through the region's inland waters and coasts.

A day is enough for the cathedral, a walk through Den Gamle By and a circuit of the rainbow walkway at ARoS, three very different centuries of the same city, each still doing its own version of what Aarhus has always done: bringing people to the water's edge and giving them a reason to stay.

The harbour itself has changed use as thoroughly as the city around it. Aarhus's old industrial docks, once given over entirely to shipping and warehousing, have been redeveloped over the past two decades into new housing and public space, a transformation not unlike the one Copenhagen's own harbour underwent slightly earlier, and a fairly deliberate signal that a city built on trade a thousand years ago has no particular intention of stopping now, even if what moves through its harbour today looks rather different from a Viking-age cargo of amber and furs.