Kongernes Nordsjælland

Kongernes Nordsjælland National Park, the Kings' North Zealand, was established in 2018 north of Copenhagen and protects some 263 km² spread across several sectors of forest, lake and coast. It is the most recent of the Danish national parks.

Its character comes from history: these woods were the hunting grounds of the Danish monarchy for centuries, and that status preserved them from the agricultural clearance that transformed the rest of Zealand. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, under Christian V, a geometric grid of straight forest rides and star-shaped junctions was laid out across them, designed for par force hunting, in which riders pursued the deer until it was exhausted. That layout, still perfectly visible on the ground and in aerial photographs, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2015 as the par force hunting landscape in North Zealand, a cultural property.

The park includes the woods of Gribskov, one of the largest in Denmark, Lake Esrum, the country's second by volume, and the Gribskov Nord reserve, as well as a stretch of the Kattegat coast. It holds important populations of red deer and fallow deer, a direct legacy of the old hunting grounds, and a community of birds and insects tied to the old trees that royal forest management left standing.