Flakfortet, Copenhagen (guest harbour, fortress island)
Flakfortet is one out of three artificial fortress islands right outside Copenhagen. They are demilitarized now, and Flakfortet is open for sailors. We went out there Monday evening with some friends, did some barbecuing (barbecue is actually strictly forbidden on the island - but with our Cobbs grill we can safely grill on board the boat. I'm a bit annoyed that it's difficult to get our kids out of the boat sometimes, at least I got the two youngest out, but they were happy staying at the playground, they didn't bother going for a walk. Eventually I went for a walk with two of our guests.
From Flakfortet it's possible to see Malmö in Sweden, Copenhagen (Denmark), the Øresund bridge (connecting Malmö and Copenhagen). Since I don't have a camera with zoom, the windmills outside Copenhagen is all I could capture ... and hardly even that ...
Here is our boat
View towards Malmö.
View towards Øresundbroen, and there is also Saltholm, a very flat and quite big island, some few pixels high on the photo below - and with some few patches of forests that are almost visible on the photo below. The highest point on that island is 3 metres above sea level, and there is a lack of sweet water - the water from the wells is slightly salty.
There are many tunnels on the island, some of them are open to the public, particularly this "main" tunnel
There are no cannons on the island, but the fundaments are still in place.
It's possible to get from the base of most of the cannons down to the main tunnel (some few are closed). At some places there is also some stairs making it easier for tourist to explore ... oh, looking at the photo, I see that someone has possibly forgotten a key for some kind of box there behind the stairs.
I came up this way, but that was a bit spooky ... this stair seems to need some maintenance!
The harbour goes all the way around the island, but one part of it is closed and reserved for swimming
I found a sauna too, but it was locked
The island also has a restaurant and a hostel, and in the harbour office there is also a small shop where it's possible to buy ice cream, bread and more. For the sailors there are WCs, but no showers, no laundry, no garbage bins ... but a little bit of electricity.
The photos are available in full resolution on IPFS QmTrNS8YDhqrqmGQphWMgREx1JQq4HmnPLoQHzXGRGBc1K. For all photos taken at Flakfortet, see IPFS QmRXmG5LahQHtb8UsfgbzYWR9R79ojTsTi6pNJYqBoXiUo. License: CC BY-SA 4.0
Very interesting island. You say it is an artificial fortress island. What's artificial about it? The fortress part? The island part?
And is this a leftover from WWII? I guess when I think of Scandinavia, and in particular Denmark, I don't think of the military so much, so I'm wondering what other use there may have been outside of a major war.
My family originally comes from the Copenhagen area. I've never been there, but my Dad got to go nearly 60 years ago as a young man. I'm sure a lot has changed since then. :)
A great adventure as always.
As far as I can understand, there was no island there before (or eventually just a very flat and small island), the whole thing is constructed on the seabed (the whole are is quite shallow - some 2-7 metres deep).
The fortress was built during first world war. During second world war, I think they managed to make one shot against German airplanes before the Danes surrended and hence the fortress got a ceasefire order. The Germans basically told the Danes that either they could surrender peacefully, or all Copenhagen would be decimated by bomber airplanes. We have a fortress outside Oslo, the Oscarsborg fortress, despite the military being far from ready for war, with most of the equipment out of order or missing, they did manage to sink one German warship and hence the invasion of Oslo was delayed - which may have been crucial for evacuating the King, government and gold.
Scandinavia being peaceful? Don't forget the Vikings ... and Sweden and Denmark has frequently been at war with each other. The Swedish Empire was quite big at its biggest. Norway was officially in a "union" with Denmark, in reality we were probably sort of annexed into it ... the capital was in Copenhagen. Denmark sort of lost Norway to Sweden as a part of war reparations in 1814. Norway seized the opportunity to claim independence, but the Swedish military put an end to that, we eventually gained independence in 1905.
Norway and Denmark became NATO members during the cold war. Both Denmark and Norway has military strategical importance due to the coastline and shipping, and we've been frontline countries during the cold war.
Nowadays such fortresses are kind of obsoleted for technical reasons.
Yeah, definitely some warring history in Scandinavia, especially the farther back you go. I was thinking more recently, within the last 100 years or less.
Okay, so the island was artificial, and one of three. Wow. That would have been cool to see being constructed. I'm sure they were a major undertaking to build them up above what might have existed, especially so tunnels could be built.
It sounds like Norway did a better job of fending the Germans off than Denmark did. One shot and surrender. Well, there are times where you live to fight another day. I don't know much about Denmark's involvement in the war, but hopefully their surrender meant lives were saved. Or some other kind of positive outcome.
They avoided Copenhagen being bombed to shreds.
I guess that in Norway the evacuation of the decision-makers meant that there were nobody to negotiate with, hence we also avoided terror bombing.
Man I was checking the map after reading your post. The distance between Flakfortet and Saltholm is four kilometers. With the highest point on the Saltholm island being only 3 meters, its no wonder that camera was barely able to catch any pixels of it. Although the calculations show that a height of 3 meters can be visible from more than 5 kilometers :-)
The old military structures makes the island looks like a place to explore. Great pictures, all of them!
The photos were taken from the top of Flakfortet, not from the sea level, that probably makes a great difference on what one can see :)
I did indeed think of it, some flat-earthers claim that one can see things at any distance if having sufficient amounts of zoom. Flakfortet is quite ideal for experimenting with this as it's possible to set up camera on a tripod both quite close to the sea level as well as on the top of the fortress, and then compare photos of Copenhagen and Malmö.
The even surface of the calm seas does provide a pretty good area to experiment on. The islands are close enough to be visible by the naked eye so one can do some rough calculations to get few preliminary results.
Did that, but the flat-earther claimed I would be able to see the "hidden" parts if I had used a camera with 60x zoom instead of a 6x50 binocular. To utilize 60x zoom, a steady triod and absolutely no waves seems to be a must.
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a think my favorite activity is to explorer old military buildings a have been a lot on karmøy its filled whit bunkers from 2 world war.
its shomting on the man made "broken down" thing sitting in the world like ist always been there.
Those are awesome pics.. I can easily visualize the cannons there...
To bad the sauna was closed 🤨