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Tivoli Gardens: Visiting Copenhagen's Historic Pleasure Garden
Open since 1843 in the heart of the city, Tivoli mixes fairground rides, gardens, music and seasonal decoration. Here is what to know before you go.
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Tivoli Gardens sits right in the centre of Copenhagen, between the main railway station and City Hall Square, and it is one of the oldest amusement parks still operating anywhere in the world. It opened on 15 August 1843, when the entertainer and publisher Georg Carstensen secured a royal charter to lay out a pleasure garden on land just outside the city ramparts.
What makes Tivoli distinctive is that it was never only a fairground. From the start it combined rides with landscaped gardens, open-air music, theatre and restaurants, and that mix survives today. Visitors can ride a modern roller coaster and then walk a few minutes to a bandstand, an ornamental lake or the pantomime theatre. The wooden roller coaster known as Rutschebanen, which opened in 1914, is one of the oldest of its kind still running and is operated with a brakeman on board.
The gardens are famous for their lighting and seasonal decoration. Thousands of coloured lamps illuminate the grounds after dark, and the park reinvents itself through the year with dedicated seasons for summer, Halloween and Christmas, when a market and festive lighting take over the grounds. The park is not open all year round in the same way; it runs in these defined seasons, so it is worth checking the current opening dates before planning a visit.
Tivoli's influence reaches beyond Copenhagen. Walt Disney is widely reported to have visited the gardens and drawn inspiration from them when planning Disneyland, and the idea of a clean, themed, family-friendly park with gardens and music is often traced in part to Tivoli.
Practical tips for visitors: entry to the gardens and rides are charged separately, so you buy an admission ticket and can then add either individual ride tickets or an unlimited-rides wristband. Prices are set in Danish kroner. The location could hardly be more convenient, a short walk from Copenhagen Central Station and served by the wider public transport network, which makes Tivoli easy to combine with a day in the city centre. Evenings are a particular draw, when the lights come on and the gardens fill with music, and on some summer nights there are free concerts and firework displays.