Paradisbakkerne

I’d been told Bornholm was flat farmland and fishing villages, so Paradisbakkerne caught me completely off guard. Lia and I had rented bikes out of Nexø and were heading vaguely south when the land just erupted into these humps of exposed granite, some the size of a car, all wearing thick green coats of moss like they’d been left out in the rain for ten thousand years — which, geologically, isn’t far off. We ditched the bikes at the first trailhead we found and just started scrambling. I remember putting my palm flat on one of the bigger boulders, cool and gritty under the moss, and thinking about the ice sheet that must have dragged itself over this exact spot and left it scoured bare.

The trails in there don’t feel engineered at all — they just find the gaps between the rocks, dipping under oak branches and skirting a couple of small, dark lakes that Lia insisted on stopping at every single time, convinced she’d spot a heron. We never did, but the stillness of that water, ringed by beech trunks, was worth the wait regardless. At one point the path narrowed into what was basically a staircase of bedrock, and I had to help Lia up over a boulder with a moss patch so thick it looked upholstered. It’s a strange, almost fairy-tale kind of terrain for an island I’d mentally filed as gentle and pastoral.

We eventually let the trail pull us east toward Bølshavn, where the forest thins out and you get your first glimpse of the coast — a nice reward after a couple of hours of granite and shade. I’d read that Almindingen, further north, is the bigger and more famous of Bornholm’s forests, but something about Paradisbakkerne’s rougher, rockier character won me over more. It felt less curated, more like the island showing you its bones.

We stopped for a snack on a flat boulder overlooking one of the lakes — bread and cheese we’d packed that morning in Nexø — and just sat there a while, boots off, listening to nothing but wind moving through the oak canopy. It’s the kind of place that rewards slowness; the granite isn’t going anywhere, and neither, for an afternoon, were we.

When to go: We went in July and the trails were dry and the canopy was full, which I’d recommend — but honestly any stretch from May to September should give you the same green, sun-dappled version of Paradisbakkerne we fell for.