Waves, dunes and new energy – Denmark’s wild west today

By Signe Hansen

While Denmark’s west coast has long been loved and feared for its wild side, visitors are increasingly discovering another dimension to it. The old respect for the sea and the no-frills holiday culture that once shaped the coastline have given way to new energy. Today, visitors surf the waves, explore national parks and embrace a slower pace of life, while local entrepreneurs add to the region’s appeal with surf centres, gourmet coffee and distinctive food experiences.

For more than half a century, German and Scandinavian families have been visiting the Danish west coast to enjoy its wide beaches and rental holiday homes. Today, the children of the first generation are returning, and with them has followed a push to combine the area’s raw nature with refined hospitality, making it easier for visitors and locals alike to slow down and appreciate what has always been there.

Photo: Nationalpark Thy Jens Kristian Kjærgaard

One of the people drawn to that combination is Majken Graver, director of Visit Vesterhavet. “For me, it’s about the space, the scale and the quiet,” she says. “When you stand on the beach on the west coast, you feel wonderfully insignificant. Whatever you’ve been worrying about suddenly matters a little less.”

That sense of space is still the coast’s strongest draw, but the offer around it has changed. Martin Backs, Graver’s colleague and a native of Hvide Sande – a town with a unique location on a narrow strip of land between Ringkøbing Fjord and the North Sea – explains: “Almost everyone comes because of the raw nature. But the cultural offers, outdoor activities and other guest experiences are what make people stay longer and come back.”

The Wadden Sea centre.

Finding ways into the wild

While the west coast’s nature has always been magnificent, many travellers have lacked obvious ways into it. In recent years, national parks and organised outdoor activities have given visitors routes, stories and practical support that make the landscape easier to explore.

The first Danish national park was Thy National Park, where dune heath, red deer, wind-shaped landscapes, surfing, food culture and history sit side by side. With an extensive network of hiking and cycling routes, the park has turned one of Denmark’s most elemental landscapes into something visitors can move through without losing its rawness.

Further south, the Wadden Sea offers a different kind of drama. Here, the landscape is never fixed. Tides withdraw to reveal the seabed, birds move with the water, and light shifts across mudflats, islands and wide beaches. Yet the very scale that makes this UNESCO-listed landscape so extraordinary can also make it difficult to read. Expanded and reopened in an award-winning building in 2017, the Wadden Sea Centre helps visitors find their way into it, with activities ranging from guided walks and oyster safaris to sailing trips and seal safaris.

Kitesurfing Hvide Sande. Photo: @Jakob Gjerluf

Alongside the national parks, local entrepreneurs have made the region more accessible to visitors new to nature-based travel. Among them is Stine Holm from VesterhavsCaminoen, which she and her boyfriend started straight out of secondary school. Their first trips began in 2019, and from there, the concept grew quickly.

Today, many guests are first-time hikers. They want nature, but not necessarily a primitive experience. Accommodation, maps, luggage transport, food guides and practical support are part of the appeal. “We help people get out and into themselves,” says Holm. “Some walk because they need time to reflect, to be together in another way, or simply to feel themselves again.”

The clientele has also broadened. What began largely with older couples has expanded to include younger travellers, friends and solo walkers, some drawn by shelters and a more raw, outdoor feel – but still with comfort and security close at hand. “Many are looking for unique and authentic experiences,” says Holm. “They want to get out to places they wouldn’t necessarily find on their own.”

Twenty Twenty Coffee, Hvide Sande. Photo: @Flemming Gernyx

Comfort, coffee and coastal flavour

While the west coast’s landscape and nature have long been recognised as major attractions, many visitors have also associated the area with simple summer houses, cold floors, board games and home cooking. Today, however, modern and luxurious summer houses continue to increase in number, new accommodation options are emerging, and the food scene has become part of the wider coastal experience. It now ranges from farm shops and bakeries to Asian-inspired restaurants, Nordic cuisine and proper coffee.

That change can be followed down the coast. In Thy, Michelin-starred Restaurant TRI in Agger has helped place the far northern stretch of the west coast on Denmark’s culinary map. Further south, around Ringkøbing, the old market town is no longer only a practical stop between the beach and a holiday house, but also home to local craft outlets, established eateries, newer restaurants and an indulgent spa.

In Hvide Sande, a town long defined by fishing, the shift feels especially vivid. Here, the newly opened Restaurant RI10 brings a refined approach to local fish and west-coast ingredients. Named after a fishing cutter that capsized in the 1980s, when three fishermen lost their lives, the restaurant also recalls a time when the sea was a dangerous but vital source of income.

The change is visible at a more everyday level too. Coffee bars such as Twenty Twenty Coffee have made a proper cup of coffee part of the rhythm of the town. “The fact that I can walk down and buy a barista coffee in Hvide Sande says something,” says Graver. “A few years ago, many would never have imagined that anyone would pay more than 20 kroner for a cup of coffee.”

Holm from VesterhavsCaminoen sees the same expectation among walkers. They come for the open coast, planned routes, good accommodation and proper meals. “They have high expectations,” she says. “We first thought the trips should be as cheap as possible, but we found out that our guests want quality.”

Photo: Vesterhavs Caminoen

Turning the sea into a playground

If food, cafés and organised hikes have changed how visitors stay on the west coast, surfing has changed how they meet the sea. For generations, the North Sea was something to work, respect and sometimes fear. Today, it is also something people enter for play, freedom and community.

Up north, Klitmøller has long been known as Cold Hawaii, Denmark’s most famous surf destination and a benchmark for serious wave surfers. Further south, however, other places have their own appeal.

In Hvide Sande, the combination of the North Sea on one side and Ringkøbing Fjord on the other offers a unique setup. There are waves for those who want them, but also shallow, flatter water where beginners, families and children can windsurf and kitesurf without feeling thrown straight into the deep end.

Daniel Mirecki, chair of Hvide Sande Surf Club, explains, “As a windsurfer, this is number one,” he says. “You have the North Sea on one side if you’re into waves, and the fjord with many different spots that work in different wind directions.”

For locals, the change is also cultural. The sea that once represented danger and livelihood has become a reason to move here, stay here, and bring up children here. Backs from Visit Vesterhavet describes how people from outside helped locals see the coast differently. “Those of us who grew up here saw the sea as something big and dangerous,” he says. “Then people came from outside and said: you live in the best place – you have the Nordic region’s biggest playground.”

Mirecki sees the same shift in the surf club. What began with just a handful of members has grown to around 120 in a town of about 3,000. “It’s not only the crazy newcomers and holiday makers,” he says. “Some of the real locals have also discovered it.”

Visit, and you might end up staying

For some, the west coast remains a place to visit for a week or two, to breathe out, walk further than planned, eat well and return home with sand still turning up in bags and shoes. For others, the pull becomes harder to leave behind.

That was the case for Graver. Originally from the Aarhus area, she stayed in a small house in Hvide Sande during the first Covid lockdown in 2020. “My sons were the ones who asked, ‘Why don’t we just move to Hvide Sande?’” she recalls. “I told them there would be nothing for them to do, but they just said that if it didn’t work out, we could move back. So, we took the step – and they were happy. Instead of sitting around watching YouTube videos, they were out surfing all the time.”

In its own way, Mirecki’s story follows the same current. He grew up in Ringkøbing, later lived in Frederiksberg, and moved west with his family to be closer to the water. His son surfs, too. What once drew mainly holidaymakers now also draws people looking for a different everyday life – one with wind in it, but also community, schools, cafés, clubs, sports and room to move.

For Graver, that is the deeper promise of the place. “The west coast has so much of what people take medicine for,” she says with a laugh. “Fresh air, nature, movement and good company. We’re simply outside more – whatever the weather, you go down to the beach.”

It is a fitting final image of the coast today: still wild, still windy, but with more ways in, more reasons to stay, and a growing sense that calm is found not despite the wildness, but through it.