Our one Denmark venture outside of Copenhagen was to the small town of Dragor. It was about a forty minute bus ride from Copenhagen. Dragor and another town called Store Magleby are on the island of Amager. Our guide said that Amager was called “shit island” because at some point not too far back in its history, all the sewage from Copenhagen was sent here. So we went on this trip without letting our expectations get too high.

Dragor was founded in the 12th century and it quickly grew as a fishing port. Dragor is pronounced ‘Drah-were’. ‘Drag’ means draw boats ashore and ‘or’ means a beach covered in sand or gravel. In the early days, the Baltic Sea was full of fish, especially herring, and Dragor flourished. Eventually, the sea was overfished and Dragor looked for other things. But as they kept fishing farther and farther out, they became much better skippers which later led to this being a major shipping port.

Amager island has a Dutch ancestry as well since King Christian II invited a group of Dutch farmers to settle here and produce food for his royal household. Those families settled in Store Magleby. So Amager island has the Dutch town of Store Magleby and the Danish town of Dragor. One town fished while the other farmed.

Dragor today is a great small town with a population of about 12,000. The town is picturesque with its roads being a maze of alleys, yellow-painted houses, red roofs, cobblestone streets, lots of lilacs and flowers, a still active harbor, a view of the bridge to Sweden with Sweden on the horizon, and a town still surrounded by sea coast, virgin forests, and meadows.

The first photo is a small chunk of the main shopping or business street. It starts a block or so to the right and goes down to the left all the way to the harbor and marina.

The second photo is across the street and down from the first photo. At first, I thought this was just a small central plaza but as I looked at it I realized it was also a sitting place and a large circular bicycle parking lot. There were not too many bikes on this day, probably because it was raining. I like the bike parking lot though.

The third photo is from out on one of the piers looking back across the marina towards town. If I turned around from this photo, I could see Sweden on the horizon.

A street in a neighborhood is in the fourth photo. The streets and houses were very traditional Danish. Our guide said that Dragor has 747 houses from the 1700’s and 1800’s. You can notice the narrow cobblestone streets, the nice houses with nice landscaping. Also, if you look at the first house on the right side of the street, set back, you can see that it has a thatched roof. Many of the houses that we saw in Dragor had thatched roofs.

This last photo will tell you a lot about Dragor. I zoomed in too far on this photo. This pilot boat is actually in the parking lot of the marina sitting up on wooden beams. There were four guys in the boat, all walking around and talking up a storm. We had a local person who talked to us about Dragor there in the marina area. Someone asked her about the pilot boat and what the men were doing. The woman just laughed and laughed before answering. She said that this boat had been up on piers for years. She said the four men were retired pilot boat captains who came there about once a week, climbed up a ladder into the boat, and spent the day talking over old times. Then she laughed some more. Dragor is that kind of town.