Flensburg Audio Tours

Flensburg sits seven kilometres from the Danish border at the innermost end of a Baltic Sea fjord, and it has spent eight hundred years being argued over by the two countries on either side of it. Danish settlers founded it by 1200; German merchants arrived shortly after. The city was Danish for centuries, then briefly occupied by Napoleon's troops, then handed to Prussia after the Second Schleswig War in 1864. In 1920, a plebiscite divided the old duchy: the northern villages chose Denmark, the city of Flensburg chose Germany by a margin that is still a point of local discussion. Today a significant Danish minority runs its own schools, churches, and library within the city, and the border fifteen minutes north is barely noticeable.

The old merchant quarter along the harbour, a strip of sixteenth and seventeenth century warehouses and counting houses, tells the story of how Flensburg got wealthy.

The rum trade made it. Ships brought cane sugar from the Danish West Indies (now the US Virgin Islands) to be refined and distilled in Flensburg, and the resulting rum became one of the most traded commodities in northern Europe. At its peak in the early nineteenth century, dozens of distilleries operated here. Only one active rum producer remains today, A.H. Johannsen, but the warehouses along Grosse Strasse still carry the memory in their proportions.