The Christiansborg's Tower

This guide to Christiansborg's Tower in Copenhagen starts with a weather vane spinning above a tower built forty centimeters taller than the city hall clock tower across town, and no accident. It traces two fires that leveled earlier versions of the palace, from the 1794 blaze that sent the royal family fleeing into borrowed mansions joined by a covered walkway, to a second citywide inferno barely a year later that burned nine hundred houses and left a hundred thousand Copenhageners homeless. The second Christiansborg lasted less than a century before fire took it too, in October of 1884.