About this site
I am Søren Hvidberg. I was born in Christianshavn and spent nine years as a bike mechanic two streets from the Christiania gate, rebuilding the cargo trikes the Freetown designed. This site is my attempt to tell visitors what the place actually is before they walk into it.
Who I am
The trike work is the reason I know Christiania at all. The Christiania cargo bike was designed inside the Freetown in the 1980s and became a Copenhagen standard, which meant that for the better part of a decade I was in and out of the workshops in there most weeks, collecting frames, arguing about bearings and drinking coffee I had not asked for. You learn a neighbourhood differently when you keep turning up on a weekday for a boring reason.
I have watched the place change through the 2016 clearance of the stalls, the concrete barricades that went up in August 2023, and the morning in April 2024 when residents came out with crowbars and dug up the cobblestones of Pusher Street themselves. That last one is the single most important thing a visitor needs to know, and it is the page I would read first: what happened to Pusher Street.
I am a neighbour, not a resident. I have never lived inside the gate, I do not speak for anyone who does, and I am careful on this site to say what I have seen rather than what the community thinks. Around 850 to 1,000 people live in there. None of them asked me to write this.
What this site is for
Christiania is a neighbourhood rather than an attraction, and most visitors arrive with a picture of it that stopped being true in April 2024. So the job here is narrow: explain what the Freetown is, set out how to behave in somebody’s front garden, and say honestly which of the guided tours actually go inside and which merely pass through. The six tours are compared on all tours and reviewed one by one on the reviews hub, using the GetYourGuide ratings as they stand rather than as I would like them to stand.
What this site is not
This is an independent site. It is not Christiania. I am not the Christiania community, not Fonden Fristaden Christiania, and not Rundvisergruppen, the residents’ own guide group. I am not a tour operator either: I run no tours, employ no guides and sell no tickets. Nothing written here should be read as the Freetown speaking, and if anything on this site contradicts what a resident or a sign inside the gate tells you, believe them and not me.
The site earns affiliate commission on bookings made through its links to GetYourGuide. That is the whole business model, it is set out in full on the affiliate disclosure, and it is why you will find me saying that a tour rated 5.0 from three reviews is not the safe choice.
Corrections are welcome and I act on them. Write to me.