Skåne: Discoveries on the small island of Ven in the Öresund

The island with the short name is located in the Öresund between the Danish island of Zealand and Sweden Ven, whose existence was previously unknown to me. You could almost swim across, but that Ferry, which also takes a few cars, takes at least half an hour.

On board are day trippers, the post bus, which I will meet several times in the following hours while distributing things, some young world travelers from Asia and a group of older Swedish women with their bulky golf luggage. At a good seven square kilometers, Ven is as big as Heligoland, and the view of the water from the 40-meter-high cliff is no less dramatic.

After the port of Bäckviken, almost all visitors switch to bicycles: the rental service offers 1,500 bikes. After just a few minutes I am alone, cycling in the wind through fields, on a narrow path past cliffs, blackberry bushes and rosehip hedges. In the first half hour I see deer, the remains of the feathers of a seagull that was dismembered by a bird of prey and I spook pheasants several times.

The Stjerneborg Observatory

The most beautiful view is the distant view of Denmark, of the waterway and the pillars of the gigantic Öresund Bridge rising behind the horizon in the south from the cliff on which the fresh whitewashed church of St. Ibbs sits. In the medieval building there are more models of old sailing ships than carved figures of saints.

The local whiskey distillery Spirit of Hven, with its ugly containers as a warehouse and a high-class restaurant, seems like a foreign body on the down-to-earth nature conservation island. But the real attraction of Vens lies hidden beneath the surface of the earth: that Tycho Brahe Museum.

When Ven was still part of Denmark in the 16th century, the astronomer Tyco Brahe (1546 to 1601) first built his Uraniborg Castle and later the Stjerneborg Observatory, which was sunk into the ground, so that he could observe the sky in the clear air.

The Renaissance garden has been symbolically reconstructed at the former location of the castle. The neo-Gothic church next to it was converted into a magnificent exhibition hall about Brahe’s life and work. During excavations the remains of Stjerneborg were discovered.

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