Nexø

Nexø is the island’s second-largest town and its least visited by the cycling tourists who tend to cluster on the northeast coast around Gudhjem and Svaneke. It sits in the southeast, facing Sweden across a stretch of open Baltic, and it has the honest, unreconstructed quality of a place that earns its living from the sea rather than from the people who come to look at it. I arrived from Dueodde to the south, following the coastal road as it straightened out through farmland and turned abruptly into the harbor front, where a trawler was unloading crates of something I could smell before I could see what it was.

The harbor at Nexø is the largest working fishing harbor on Bornholm — not a marina with pleasure craft, not a heritage quay with artisan stalls, but a real commercial harbor with cranes and ice machines and the particular industrial beauty of functional infrastructure doing its job. The boats that fish the Baltic out of Nexø go for cod and herring and the small Baltic sprat that ends up in tins throughout Scandinavia, and in the morning when the catch comes in there is a bustle that has nothing to do with tourism and everything to do with refrigeration schedules and buyers from the mainland. I watched it for an hour from a bench with a cup of coffee and felt less like a tourist than I had anywhere else on the island.

The town was severely damaged by Soviet bombing in May 1945 — four days before the German surrender, Russian forces bombed Nexø and Rønne in support of an ultimately unnecessary invasion, killing civilians and destroying much of both town centers. The Nexø Museum holds a permanent exhibition on this episode, which is relatively little-known outside Denmark and which the exhibition presents with a careful mixture of grief and geopolitical complexity that resists easy narrative. Next to it, another gallery documents the life and work of Martin Andersen Nexø, the town’s most famous son, a social realist novelist born here in 1869 who wrote the epic four-volume Pelle the Conqueror and was nominated for the Nobel Prize. The museum is not large but it is honestly assembled, and it gives the town a literary dimension that its harbor-focused practicality does not otherwise advertise.

The granite coast south of Nexø is where the island’s geology becomes most visible. Bornholm sits on a platform of Precambrian granite and gneiss — among the oldest exposed rock in northern Europe — and around Nexø the stone comes to the surface in low, humped outcroppings that shape the coastline into a series of small coves separated by rock fingers running into the sea. Swimming here requires you to pick your way down the granite to the water — no lifeguard, no changing rooms, just rock and cold Baltic water and the sound of waves working into the cracks. The water is clear and cold even in August, and after ten minutes you emerge onto sun-warmed granite and dry immediately in the wind.

The cherry orchards between Nexø and Svaneke are among the largest on Bornholm, and in early June when the blossom is at its peak the road between the two towns passes through a corridor of white that holds even in grey light. The cherry season runs through July, and the farm stalls along the road sell boxes of them for prices that seem calculated to shame the supermarket. I bought two kilos on the way back from Nexø and ate them over two days with cheese and crackers and the end of a bottle of aquavit I had been carrying in my pannier for exactly this kind of occasion.

When to go: Nexø works in all seasons in a way that some of the more scenic towns do not — the harbor operates year-round and the museum is open through winter. For the granite coast swimming, July and August when the Baltic surface temperature reaches fifteen or sixteen degrees. For cherry blossom, early to mid-June. For the harbor at its most atmospheric, arrive before seven in the morning when the overnight trawlers come in and the quay is genuinely working.