Where to Stay in Tårnby, Capital Region of Denmark

Tårnby is best known as the home of Copenhagen Airport. Denmark's busiest air hub sits on its eastern side at Kastrup, where the whirlpool aquarium of Den Blå Planet draws crowds to the waterfront beside the runways. The town serves the city's air traffic.

Inland it stays a quiet residential suburb of Amager, with the art collection at Kastrupgårdsamlingen, the playing fields of Sundby Idrætspark, and the Dutch-rooted Hollændergårdene recalling the farmers who once worked this flat island land.

Den Blå Planet is the landmark visitors come for. Denmark's national aquarium curls in a silver whirlpool of a building by the water at Kastrup, beside the airport. Art and sport fill out the rest.

Kastrupgårdsamlingen shows its collection in an old farm manor, Filips Kirke and Simon Peters Kirke serve the parishes, and a string of grounds from Sundby Idrætspark and Hekla Park to the Vestamager Idrætsanlæg give the suburb its playing fields, while the Hollændergårdene keep the memory of Amager's Dutch farmers.

Tårnby began as a village of farmers and fishers. It grew on the flat land of Amager south of Copenhagen, where the soil was good for market gardening and the sound provided fish, and the Dutch settlers brought to the island in the sixteenth century left their mark in the farms remembered at the Hollændergårdene. Vegetables fed the capital.

For centuries the village supplied Copenhagen's markets with produce while staying rural, its parish gathered around the old church on the island plain. The twentieth century changed everything at speed. The city spread south across Amager, turning Tårnby into a dense residential suburb, and an airport rose on the flat ground at Kastrup that grew into Copenhagen Airport, the busiest in the whole country.

Land reclaimed from the sound added new ground, and the artificial islet of Peberholm was later raised offshore to carry the great fixed link toward Sweden. The town now lives by the runways, the metro and the motorways as much as by the old market fields.

Tårnby lies in eastern Denmark, on the island of Zealand, occupying the centre of Amager just south of central Copenhagen in the south-eastern Capital Region. The island is famously flat. The suburb of Kastrup and the airport face the sound on its eastern shore, the city suburb of Sundbyvester adjoins it to the north, and the low islets of Saltholm and Peberholm lie offshore in the water toward Sweden.

Reclaimed flats and meadows ring the southern edge of town.

Tårnby has a cool, breezy coastal climate. Lying low and open on Amager beside the sound, the suburb feels the wind off the water through grey, damp winters and mild summers, with little shelter on the flat island. Storms sweep across the runways.

Spring greens the reclaimed meadows toward the south slowly, while the long light of summer brings bathers to the water near Den Blå Planet before the autumn gales return across the open ground around Kastrup.

Getting to Tårnby is simple, because the airport is here. Copenhagen Airport at Kastrup sits on the eastern edge of town, with flights from across Europe and beyond landing on the doorstep. Arrivals step almost straight in.

The driverless metro and frequent trains run from the airport and Tårnby station into central Copenhagen in minutes, motorways cross Amager to the city and the bridge toward Sweden, and the line over Peberholm carries traffic on across the sound.