Central Jutland

Two of the best-preserved bodies of the European Iron Age came out of this region's bogs: Tollund Man, hanged around 400 BC and found by peat-cutters west of Silkeborg in 1950, and Grauballe Man, found two years later. Aarhus began in the late 8th century as Aros, a Viking trading town "at the river mouth", and had a bishop by 948. Inland, Viborg — the "holy hill" — was the seat of the Jutland assembly, where Danish kings were acclaimed. King Erik Klipping was stabbed to death in a barn at nearby Finderup in 1286, and Hans Tausen's preaching from 1525 made the town the cradle of the Danish Reformation.

West of the lakes lay heather moor. German settlers, the "potato Germans", were brought in to farm it near Viborg in 1759, but it was the loss of Schleswig in 1864 that launched the great reclamation: the Danish Heath Society, founded in 1866, planted windbreaks and conifers, marled the sand and turned moor into farms, and heath villages such as Herning grew into textile towns. Silkeborg grew up only from 1844, around a paper mill on the Gudenå. The railway of 1862 and a deep harbour made Aarhus the capital of Jutland in all but name, and its university opened in 1928.

The German occupiers lined the North Sea coast with the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall, and on 31 October 1944 RAF Mosquitos destroyed the Gestapo headquarters in the university's halls of residence. In 1978 teachers and volunteers at the Tvind schools near Ulfborg finished what was then the world's largest wind turbine; the industry that followed — Vestas began at Lem, near Ringkøbing — made the region the home of Danish wind power.

Aarhus styles itself the City of Smiles and is, by average age, the youngest city in Denmark, thanks to its large student population. It plays second city to Copenhagen with good humour — "Aarhus stories", jokes in which its citizens are amiably slow, are told all over the country — and in 2011 it dropped the letter Å to spell itself Aarhus again. The Aarhus Festuge fills ten days from late August with concerts and street art, the NorthSide festival comes in June, and each July re-enactors camp on the beach below Moesgaard for the Viking Moot, with a market and combat displays.

The lake district has its place in national memory: from 1839 the pastor-poet Steen Steensen Blicher, who wrote in Jutland dialect, called public meetings on Himmelbjerget that became early patriotic rallies. Silkeborg raised the painter Asger Jorn, of the CoBrA group, whose collection is the core of Museum Jorn. Holstebro surprised the country in 1966 by buying a Giacometti for its square and offering a home to the experimental Odin Teatret, which is still there, and Skanderborg's Smukfest is held each August among the beeches.

West Jutlanders are cast as thrifty, stubborn and sparing with words, people for whom "not so bad" is high praise. The west-coast fishing villages were strongholds of the Inner Mission, a pietist revival within the Lutheran church that frowned on drink, cards and dancing, and its mission houses still stand on many main streets. Handball is the winter passion of the towns: Holstebro, Skjern and Bjerringbro-Silkeborg all field top-league sides.

Aarhus, Denmark's second city, is by far the region's largest, with about 280,000 people. Randers and Horsens have about 65,000 each, Silkeborg and Herning just over 50,000, Viborg, the regional seat, about 40,000 and Holstebro 37,000. The west-coast towns are small, with Ringkøbing at 10,000, and Samsø has 3,700 islanders.

The eastern strip along the E45 motorway, from Randers through Aarhus to Horsens, is one of the fastest-growing parts of Denmark, and the docks of Aarhus — still the country's largest container port — are giving way to the towers and harbour baths of the new Aarhus Ø district. The big employers read like a list of Danish exports: Vestas, Arla and the retail groups Salling and Jysk in Aarhus, Danish Crown's pork plants at Randers and Horsens, Grundfos pumps at Bjerringbro, Bang & Olufsen at Struer since 1925, and the fashion group Bestseller and Siemens Gamesa's turbine works at Brande.

The west lives differently. Dairy and pig farms cover the reclaimed heath, the mink sheds that were a local speciality have stood empty since the government's cull of November 2020, and Hvide Sande and Thyborøn are working fishing ports. The summer-house belt behind the dunes brings large numbers of visitors each year to the Ringkøbing Fjord area, while villages inland lose their schools and young people to Aarhus. The sea is a standing concern: the coast at Thyborøn and Bovbjerg is held in place by groynes and by sand pumped ashore every year.

Aarhus is the one Danish city outside the capital with a serious restaurant scene: when the Michelin guide first looked beyond Copenhagen in 2015 it gave stars to three Aarhus kitchens, and the New Nordic manner — local fish, foraged herbs, vegetables from Samsø — runs down to the stalls of Aarhus Street Food. The older local beer is Ceres Top pilsner, which has outlived the city's Ceres brewery, closed in 2008.

Samsø's sandy soil and mild climate produce Denmark's first new potatoes, which fetch startling prices and eaten with nothing but butter and salt; the island also sends out other vegetables and strawberries. The Limfjord in the north-west gives its name to the native flat oyster, the Limfjord oyster, and Glyngøre lies on its Salling shore. On the North Sea, Hvide Sande is a working fishing port, and anglers crowd its sluice when the herring run.

Dairy is the inland trade. Arla, one of Europe's largest dairy cooperatives, is run from Aarhus; the organic cooperative Thise, founded in Salling in 1988, matures its Vesterhavsost, a hard cow's-milk cheese, at Bovbjerg on the North Sea coast. Stauning, a village on Ringkøbing Fjord, has distilled rye and single-malt whisky since 2005, and Hancock in Skive and the small brewery on Fur island supply the beer.

Aarhus keeps its sights within walking distance: Den Gamle By, an open-air museum of 75 town houses moved here from across Denmark since 1909; the ARoS art museum, crowned by Olafur Eliasson's walk-through rainbow ring; the 93-metre cathedral, the longest church in the country; and the Dokk1 library on the rebuilt harbour. To the south are the Marselisborg deer park, the circular Infinite Bridge and Moesgaard Museum, whose grass roof slopes out of a hillside above Grauballe Man.

Inland, the Silkeborg lakes are strung along the Gudenå, Denmark's longest river, among some of its largest forests. The paddle steamer Hjejlen, in service since 1861, sails from Silkeborg to the foot of Himmelbjerget, the 147-metre "sky mountain" with its brick tower of 1875, and Museum Silkeborg shows Tollund Man, his face preserved down to the stubble. Viborg has a twin-towered granite cathedral covered inside with Joakim Skovgaard's frescoes of 1900–13, cobbled lanes above two lakes and a stop on the Hærvej, the old drove road down Jutland's spine; the Mønsted limestone mines, with their wintering bats, lie west of the town.

Djursland, the blunt peninsula north-east of Aarhus, holds Mols Bjerge National Park — Ice Age hills of heath and pasture, Stone Age barrows and the ruin of Kalø Castle at the end of a causeway — and Ebeltoft, a half-timbered town with the frigate Jylland of 1860 in dry dock. Ferries cross from Grenaa to Anholt, whose interior is a lichen-covered dune "desert", and from Hou, south of Aarhus, to Samsø.

The North Sea beaches run almost unbroken down the west coast. Holmsland Klit, a dune spit one to two kilometres wide, separates the sea from Ringkøbing Fjord, with the holiday village of Søndervig, the fishing port of Hvide Sande and the 38-metre Lyngvig lighthouse. Northwards are the shipwreck museum at Thorsminde, the Bovbjerg lighthouse on its clay cliff and Thyborøn's Sea War Museum, devoted to the 1916 Battle of Jutland fought offshore.