After leaving Egå, we continued south into Aarhus, and the change was immediate. After several days spent around small harbours, beaches and quieter towns, Aarhus felt properly urban again. It is Denmark’s second-largest city, but what makes it interesting is that the sea never really disappears: the harbour, the bay, the river and the beaches are all closely connected to the city itself.
Travelling into a city of this size with a motorhome is inevitably different from arriving by car. We looked at several possible places before finding one that worked reasonably well for us. The car park on Peter Holms Vej turned out to be particularly useful because of its central position. It was large enough for our motorhome and very close to both Den Gamle By, the open-air Old Town museum, and the Botanical Garden. The drawback was that many of the individual spaces were rather narrow and short, while the only properly shaded ones were around the edges beneath trees with low branches — something worth paying attention to with a taller vehicle.
Once away from the motorhome, Aarhus is surprisingly manageable on foot. It does not have the monumental feel of Copenhagen, and we actually liked that. The centre is lively without feeling overwhelmingly large, with pedestrian streets, older buildings, cafés and the river running straight through the city. Then, only a short distance away, everything changes again around the harbour, where old industrial areas have been replaced or joined by some of the most modern architecture in Denmark.
What is easy to miss while walking around modern Aarhus is just how old the city really is. Its story reaches back to the Viking Age, when the settlement was known as Aros. The name referred to its position at the mouth of the river, an ideal location for a harbour and trading settlement. Archaeological finds in the area date back as far as around AD 700, and by the Viking period Aros had developed into an important trading town protected by an earthen rampart and moat.
That history is still hidden beneath the modern centre. Near the cathedral, the Viking Museum is actually below present street level, at approximately the level on which people walked in Aros around a thousand years ago. It is a rather strange thought when standing among modern shops and busy streets: underneath them are the remains of essentially the same town, occupying the same strategic position beside the water.
The cathedral itself marks another stage in Aarhus’s development. Its foundation stone was laid in 1201, as the medieval town began expanding beyond the original Viking settlement. The building evolved over several centuries and today Aarhus Cathedral is about 93 metres long, making it the longest church in Denmark.
One of the places that gives Aarhus a completely different atmosphere is Den Gamle By. Rather than simply preserving one old district where it originally stood, the museum contains historic buildings brought here from different Danish towns and reconstructed together. The result is essentially a journey through several versions of Denmark, including streets representing life in 1864, 1927, 1974 and even 2014. It sits beside the Botanical Garden, which also makes this part of Aarhus feel remarkably green considering how close it is to the city centre.
The contrast becomes even stronger towards the waterfront. Aarhus has grown dramatically beyond the boundaries of the old city, particularly around the harbour, and modern buildings now stand only a short walk from streets whose origins go back to the Middle Ages. That mixture probably became our strongest impression of Aarhus: it never feels as if the historic city and the modern one have been separated into two different attractions.
We also continued along the coast south of the centre, where Aarhus changes character yet again. City streets gradually give way to beaches and woods, and here stands one of its strangest landmarks, Den Uendelige Bro — the Infinite Bridge. It is a circular wooden pier extending partly over Aarhus Bay, so instead of walking to the end of a conventional pier, you simply continue around the circle and eventually arrive back where you started. It was originally created for the Sculpture by the Sea exhibition in 2015. Local people liked it enough for it to return, and it is now reconstructed each year for the warmer months.
Further south, the landscape becomes increasingly wooded towards Moesgaard, another reminder that Aarhus is unusually easy to combine with nature. Within a comparatively short distance you can move from a Viking city centre to a modern harbour, then to beaches, forests and archaeological landscapes. Our route through Aarhus reflected that variety: our records from the day stretch from central parking through Strandvejen and Ørneredevej and eventually towards Moesgård Allé.
Aarhus was not the easiest place of this part of Denmark for us with the motorhome. Finding somewhere suitable involved more thought than at the smaller coastal stops, and several places that looked promising were not particularly convenient once vehicle size, trees or parking restrictions were taken into account. But once the motorhome was parked, the city worked much better.
We left with a much better impression of Aarhus than we had expected from simply approaching it through its suburbs. It is neither a small historic Danish town nor simply a modern Scandinavian city. It is both at once: a Viking trading settlement that never stopped growing, with a medieval centre, an open-air town built from rescued buildings, a huge modern harbour and beaches and woodland almost immediately beyond it. After the quieter coast around Egå, it was a very different stop — and one that was definitely worth making.