National Museum of Denmark

The National Museum holds the objects Denmark is made of, and its prehistory galleries are the best of their kind on Earth — because Danish bogs are archaeological time machines, preserving what every other climate destroyed. The parade of wonders is genuinely stunning: the Sun Chariot, a Bronze Age model of the sun drawn across heaven by a horse, three thousand years old and looking freshly minted; the lur horns that still play; the Egtved Girl, buried in an oak coffin in 1370 BC with her string skirt and her bracken flower intact; and the Huldremose Woman with her complete Iron Age wardrobe. Nowhere else can you look Bronze Age Europe in the face like this.

The Viking galleries carry the museum's other headline duty and discharge it with runestones, hoards of hack-silver and Arabic dirhams (globalisation, first draft), weapons, and honest curation that keeps the horned-helmet myth in its grave. Upstairs, the sweep continues through the Middle Ages' golden altars, Renaissance royal clutter, and an ethnographic collection from Greenland that is its own quiet essential — the Danish realm's Arctic half told with unusual care.

The building is the Prince's Palace, an 18th-century rococo mansion whose princely apartments survive mid-museum as a period piece, and the Children's Museum in the wing — a climbable Viking ship, a medieval castle scaled for six-year-olds — is the best rainy-day family hour in the city and included with entry.

Give it two to three focused hours (prehistory and Vikings as the spine, additions to appetite) and note the practicalities: entry is charged for adults but modest, under-18s go free, and the museum sits two minutes from Christiansborg — pairing it with the palace tower (free, and Copenhagen's highest viewpoint) makes the compact "old power" morning. The café does proper smørrebrød when the Bronze Age exhausts you, which it will, in the good way.