Northern Europe from Copenhagen

Split by lakes and surrounded by sea, an energetic and hip waterside vibe permeates Copenhagen, one of Northern Europe’s most user-friendly (and trendy) capitals.
Copenhagen city centre is waiting to be enjoyed on an MSC Northern Europe cruise excursion. It’s a welcoming, compact city with a centre largely given over to pedestrians (and cyclists) and an emphasis by day on café culture and top-notch museums.The historic core of the city is Slotsholmen, originally the site of the twelfth-centurycastle and now home to the huge Christiansborg complex.
Just across the Slotsholmen Kanal to the north is the medieval maze of Indre By (“inner city”), while to the south the island of Christianshavn is adorned with cutting-edge architecture in addition to the alternative enclave of Christiania.
North-east of Indre By are the royal quarters of KongensHave and Frederiksstaden, while to the west the expansive Rådhuspladsen leads via Tivoli Gardens to Central Station and the hotspots of Vesterbro and Nørrebro. Just off hectic Vesterbrogade outside the station is Copenhagen’s most famous attraction, Tivoli, an entertaining mixture of landscaped gardens, outdoor concerts and fairground rides.
A shore excursion on your MSC Northern Europe cruise can be the opportunity to discover Helsingør’s Kronborg Castle too. The present castle dates from the sixteenth century when it jutted into the sound as a formidable warning to passing ships not to consider dodging the toll, and it remains a grand affair, enhanced immeasurably by its setting; the interior, particularly the royal chapel, is spectacularly ornate.
Beneath the castle are the casemates, gloomy cavernous rooms that served as soldiers’ quarters during times of war.

The Warnemünde quarter in Rostock is a famous German seaside resort that you can visit when you reach the German coasts on your MSC cruise of northern Europe.

At the mouth of the river Warnow, in the Baltic Sea, Warnemünde will surprise you with its villas, hotels and the large white and silver beach. Its heart is Am Strom, next to the port, where the homes of old captains and fishermen have been turned into coffee shops and boutiques. With an excursion during the cruise, you can continue towards Schwerin.
Surrounded by lakes and with a fairytale Schloss that tickles the imagination, the town represents a pleasant surprise, given by the architecture and spirit of a historic capital. Continuing the excursion you can admire Lubeck, one of the few cities along Europe’s northern coasts that preserves the glory of medieval times.
For more than two centuries the standard bearer of the Hanseatic League, this was one of the wealthiest and most powerful of European cities, the Venice of the Baltic. The commercial opulence is best expressed in its architecture: from the oldest Rathaus in Germany to the churches with the tallest bell-towers to the merchants’ mansions.
Lubecca is the first city in Northern Europe to be included in the list of UNESCO world heritage sites in 1987. Finally, you should not leave out a visit to the cosmopolitan Berlin, the largest and liveliest city in Germany. Amongst the monuments to visit are the Brandebourgh Gate. Situated close to the Reichstag, the seat of the German parliament, the monument, designed on the model of Athens’ Acropolis, was built as the city’s arch of triumph in 1791 and soon became the symbol of unified Germany.
The Brandenburg Gate looms over the ornamental gardens in Pariser Platz which extends eastwards towards the wide, tree-lined Unter den Linden avenue, that means “Beneath the linden trees”, flanked by shops and cafés.

Bergen’s maritime tradition is age old and your MSC Cruise of Northern Europe will lay anchor in a setting which exudes history.
An excursion on land will give you the opportunity to visit the Hanseatic quarter, where you find the oldest buildings in Bergen, built along the Bryggen docks, one of the most active and lively parts of town. Included by UNESCO amongst the world heritage sites, this quarter has preserved the old buildings of the port, and is, with its narrow alleys and dark, open galleries, one of the best preserved Medieval boroughs of the country.

A vacation in Norway with an MSC cruise will give you the opportunity to explore this fascinating land. A visit to the Hanseatic Museum and the Schøtstuene, the merchant navy league assembly will help you get to better know this intriguing town.
Håkon Hall in the royal palace built by King Håkon Håkonsson in the mid-14th century and the adjacent Rosenkrantz tower (1270) reflect to this day the power of the Hanseatic League in the Middle Ages. All this can be admired also from above with a ride on the Fløibanen funicular, that takes you up to the peaks of Mount Fløyen, from which it is worth walking down on foot: after crossing landscapes of rare beauty you will find yourself in the lively bustle of the fish market. You can take a walk amidst the wooden homes built on the side of the hill and along the long smau, the narrow passages typical of Bergen.
Take time to visit the original wooden church of Fantoft, built in 1150 but transferred here only in 1882. Along the shores of Lake Lille Lungegårdsvann you find many art galleries and a museum with a collection of paintings by Edward Munch. In Troldhaugen instead, there is the museum-home of the most famous Norwegian composer, Edvard Grieg, who worked and lived here in a small cottage on Lake Nordås.

In Kristiansand the MSC cruise of Northern Europe touches the southernmost part of Norway, the region of Sørlandet, where thousands of islands and rocks dot the coast along the Skagerrak straits.

As you step ashore from the ship you find yourself in a lively town offering plenty of opportunities and attractions, such as the Kilden Performing Arts Centre, a striking building for its bold architecture, that hosts exhibitions and concerts all year round. The zoo and the Kristiansand amusement park (12 km from the town) are also an experience for the whole family.
There are museums like the Vest-Agder that gives the visitor insight into the local culture and history with impressive models of the town with its most representative buildings. The nature museum with its botanical gardens instead hosts the largest collection of cactus plants in Norway.
The Sørlandet museum of art hosts a permanent collection of Norwegian art while the imposing canons museum hosts the second largest cannon in the world and a rich collection of military exhibits. If instead you wish to immerse yourself in Kristiansand’s everyday life, visit the fish market, here you can find restaurants where you can enjoy the freshest fish, while there’s a bustling of boats coming and going. Try an experience into the past with a ride on the steam engine train.
You can get to the village of Vennes and then get a ticket for the Setesdal railway, which has since the 19th century connected Kristiansand and the other coastal towns to the once remote region of Setesdal. You should not miss an excursion to the delightful town of Lillesand, known as the jewel of the Sørlandet, with picturesque fishermen’s houses that have been turned into holiday homes in an environment of rare charm with the colourful port and ever-present Norwegian nature.

Located between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, Hamburg will fascinate you from the moment you first set eyes on its elegant and austere buildings looking onto the port, one of the largest in Europe.

When you reach this destination on an MSC Cruise of Northern Europe, you can get a taste of its glorious history. Hamburg is a cosmopolitan, wealthy and fashionable city, with an aggressive economy, that still prides itself of the title “free Hanseatic city”.
It has, in fact, never cut its umbilical cord with maritime trade that has its heart in the port where your cruise liner will be waiting for you. Many tourist come here to visit the Reeperbahn, the red light district, but if you want to take in the atmosphere of the city, you shouldn’t miss an excursion to Speicherstadt (Warehouse Town), where the cobbled streets, gables and turrets combine to make the area on the other side of Zollkanal (Tax Canal) a world apart from the city opposite.
Another city icon, St Michaelis, at the western edge of the city centre by Ludwig-Erhard-Strasse, is Hamburg’s iconic church and no wonder. More than any other building, the “Michael” mirrors the city’s irrepressible spirit. Burned down after a lightning strike in1750, it was rebuilt in Baroque style under Ernst Georg Sonnin but it again accidently caught fire in1906.
In 1945, the Allies obliterated the roof and decor of church number three. Reconstructed again to Sonnin’s plans, it is now the finest Baroque church in North Germany. Probably the most gratifying attraction during an excursion on an MSC Cruise is the scenery you can admire from one of the best views over Hamburg: the 360-degree panorama takes in Speicherstadt, the container port and shipping on the Elbe, the Alster lakes, and the five spires of the churches and Rathaus.

Crowds tend to overwhelm Bruges nowadays – its reputation as a perfectly preserved medieval city has made it the most popular tourist destination in Belgium – but you’d be mad to come to Flanders.

With an MSC Northern Europe cruise and miss it: Bruges’ museums hold some of the country’s finest collections of Flemish art, and its intimate, winding streets, woven around a skein of narrow canals and lined with gorgeous ancient buildings, live up to even the most inflated tourist hype.
When you step ashore from your MSC cruise, the obvious start to an exploration of the city is the two principal squares: the Markt, overlooked by the mighty belfry, and the Burg, flanked by the city’s most impressive architectural ensemble. Almost within shouting distance are the three main museums, among which the Groeninge offers a wonderful sample of early Flemish art.
Another short hop brings you to St-Janshospitaal and the important paintings of the fifteenth-century artist Hans Memling, as well as Bruges’ most impressive churches, the Onze Lieve Vrouwekerk and St-Salvatorskathedraal. Further afield, the gentle canals and maze-like cobbled streets of eastern Bruges – stretching out from Jan van Eyckplein – are extraordinarily pretty.
The most characteristic architectural feature is the crow-step gable, popular from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century and revived by the restorers of the 1880s, but there are also expansive Georgian-style mansions and humble, homely cottages.
Time and again the eye is surprised by the sober and subtle variety of the cityscape, featuring everything from intimate arched doorways and bendy tiled roofs to wonky chimneys and a bevy of discreet shrines and miniature statues.

As you sail on your MSC cruise to France, you’ll come to Le Havre, the country’s second-largest port, which takes up half the Seine estuary. However, the town itself, home to almost 200,000 people, is a place of pilgrimage for fans of contemporary architecture.

Le Havre – “The Harbour” – is the principal trading post of northern France and a port of call of our MSC Northern Europe cruises. Following its near-destruction during World War II, Le Havre was rebuilt by a single architect, Auguste Perret, between 1946 and 1964.
The sheer sense of space can be exhilarating: the showpiece monuments have a winning self-confidence, and the few surviving relics of the old city have been sensitively integrated into the whole. While the endless mundane residential blocks can be dispiriting, even those visitors who fail to agree with Perret’s famous dictum that “concrete is beautiful” may enjoy a stroll around his city. A shore excursion on your MSC Northern Europe cruise can also be the opportunity to discover Rouen, the capital of Upper Normandy, one of France’s most ancient cities.
Standing on the site of Rotomagus, built by the Romans at the lowest point where they could bridge the Seine, it was laid out by Rollo, the first duke of Normandy, in 911. Captured by the English in 1419, it became the stage in 1431 for the trial and execution of Joan of Arc, before returning to French control in 1449.
Rouen today can be very seductive, its lively and bustling centre well equipped with impressive churches and museums. North of the Seine at any rate, it’s a real pleasure to explore. As well as some great sights – Cathédrale de Notre-Dame, all the delightful twisting streets of timbered houses – there’s history aplenty too, most notably the links with Joan of Arc.