Allinge-Sandvig

Allinge and Sandvig are two towns pretending to be one, fused at the hip on the rocky northern tip of Bornholm where the island stops being soft fields and turns into bare grey granite shouldering into the Baltic. Lia and I rode up from Gudhjem on rented bicycles with the wind doing its best to send us backward, and we arrived at the harbor in Allinge wind-burned and ravenous, which on this island is a solvable problem. The smokehouse here has been curing herring over alder smoke since long before either of us was born, and the smell announces the town the way church bells announce a French village.

A coast made of granite

What strikes you first is the rock. Bornholm’s north end is the oldest geology on the island, and around Sandvig the coastline is a chaos of pink and grey granite slabs that people sunbathe on as if they were beach towels the size of cars. We walked out along the Hammeren peninsula, the headland that ends in a lighthouse, where the path threads between gorse and the Opal Lake — a flooded quarry the color of antifreeze, left behind when they stopped cutting stone here. The whole peninsula is laced with the scars of old quarries, because Bornholm granite paved half of Copenhagen, and the cut faces have weathered into something that looks almost deliberate now, almost sculptural.

Above it all sit the ruins of Hammershus, the largest castle ruin in northern Europe, which technically belongs to the next listing over but glowers down at Sandvig from its cliff regardless. From the harbor at Allinge you can see the silhouette of it against the sky, and it sets the tone: this is the dramatic end of the island, the part that feels less like a holiday and more like the edge of something.

The summer the politicians arrive

For one week every June, Allinge does something genuinely strange. The Folkemødet — the People’s Meeting — descends on the town, and this quiet fishing harbor fills with Danish politicians, journalists, lobbyists, and activists who pitch tents and argue about everything in public for four days straight. It started in 2011, borrowed from a Swedish tradition, and the locals have mixed feelings that they express with the flat Bornholm understatement I have come to love. The man who sold me a smoked mackerel told me the week was “fine, if you like talking,” and let the sentence sit there.

We were there in late July, mercifully after the shouting had packed up, and the harbor had returned to its proper business of boats and ice cream and herring. In the evening we climbed up to the Madsebakke rock carvings on the edge of town — Bronze Age petroglyphs, the largest set in Denmark, ships and sun-wheels and footprints scratched into a granite slope by people three thousand years gone. Standing there at dusk, with the Baltic going pewter below us and the smell of smoke still in our clothes, the political circus of June felt like a very recent and very minor chapter in a long, stony story.

When to go: July and August for warm granite and a working smokehouse, but avoid the Folkemødet week in June unless you specifically want to watch a country argue with itself. Spring brings the gorse into yellow flower across Hammeren, and the coastal path is at its best when you have it nearly to yourself.