Denmark’s kingdom still includes Faroes and icy Greenland
Denmark is the metropolitan heart of the Danish Realm, a unitary state that also embraces autonomous Faroe Islands and Greenland. The kingdom counts roughly 1,400 islands over 100 square metres—443 named, 78 inhabited—projecting a maritime identity born in eighth-century Baltic struggles.
Denmark proper consists of the Jutland peninsula and 406 islands, sitting between the North Sea and the Baltic, south-west of Sweden, south of Norway and sharing a short land border with Germany. More than six million people lived there in May 2025, about 40 percent on Zealand, the largest island, where Copenhagen stands. The land is mostly flat farmland with sandy shores and a temperate climate. The Faroes gained home rule in 1948, and Greenland in 1979, widened in 2009.
In 1397 Denmark joined Norway and Sweden in the Kalmar Union, which lasted until Sweden left in 1523. Denmark–Norway then lost land to Sweden in seventeenth-century wars. The Danes won the First Schleswig War of 1848, and the constitution of 5 June 1849 ended absolute monarchy, but defeat in the Second Schleswig War cost Schleswig-Holstein and turned politics toward cohesion at home, including clearing Jutland's moors for farming.
Industrialisation from the mid-nineteenth century made the country a big farm exporter, and early twentieth-century reforms laid the groundwork for its welfare state. Neutral in the First World War, Denmark was overrun by Germany in April 1940; resistance grew from 1943, Iceland declared independence in 1944 and liberation came in May 1945.
Denmark and Greenland, but not the Faroes, joined what became the European Union in 1973, keeping the krone among other opt-outs. It was the first country to give legal recognition to same-sex partnerships, and it helped found NATO, the Nordic Council, the OECD and the UN.
Source: Denmark
