Every design for Nykøbing Falster

For anyone on Lolland or Falster, sooner or later every road, train and bus leads to Nykøbing Falster. The largest town on Falster and the seat of Guldborgsund Municipality, it is where the islands come to study, to shop and to catch the train to Copenhagen or on to Germany. Locals shorten it to Nykøbing F., so nobody mixes it up with the other towns of the same name.

What sets it apart is how close the Middle Ages still sit to the surface. The town grew up around a castle raised at the narrowest point of Guldborgsund to keep Wendish raiders out; widowed queens later lived there, and today only the ruined tower known as Fars Hat remains. Klosterkirken, once part of a Franciscan friary, still stands, and just outside town Middelaldercentret rebuilds a medieval town of houses and weaponry, a favourite with summer visitors, many of them from Germany.

It is a town of small, particular museums too, from the toys at Legetøjsmuseet to the fire engines of Nykøbing F Brandmuseum, and of a long pedestrian street that ends in a broad square where late-night events fill the evenings several times a year. Above the rooftops rises the water tower, the first reinforced-concrete building in Denmark, visible long before you reach the bridge from Lolland.