Climb a ski slope built on the roof of a working incinerator

Copenhagen burns what it throws away and heats itself on the result. The plant that does it stands on the harbor at Amager, and somebody looked at the roof, which had to slope anyway, and put a ski run down it. This is no decommissioned building with a novelty on top. The furnaces are going underneath, the chimney is working, and there are people skiing over the lot of it.

The way there is by bike, because the whole city is, and the last stretch runs along the water with the building getting larger and stranger. Up close it is a sheer wall with windows set into it, and the green line running off the top edge turns out to be the slope. A path goes up the side, planted with trees and grass, and walking up costs nothing at all.

At the top there is a café, a running route around the roof and skiers going past. The view is the whole flat city at once. The climbing wall is on the outside face and it is a spectator sport for everybody without a certificate, which turns out to be most of the pleasure: standing at the bottom of a power station looking up 85 meters at somebody very small.

The plant opened in 2017 and the roof opened to the public in October 2019. It was built to burn around 400,000 metric tons of the city's waste a year. The climbing wall is 85 meters tall and 10 wide, the tallest in the world, with five routes broken into twenty-meter pitches, and it is open only to climbers holding a multi-pitch certificate and a Danish club membership. The roof, the path up it and the view are free during opening hours.