This Southern California Main Street Feels Like A Movie Set

Californians know a movie set when they see one, and the corner of Copenhagen Drive and Alisal Road in Solvang fits the bill. A wooden windmill towers over a peak-roofed bakery, its sails so oversized they seem built for the camera. Around back, a brick tower, copied from a Copenhagen landmark, sits in the courtyard, shrunk to fit. Then the street takes over with block after block of gabled shopfronts and dark wooden beams crisscrossing pale walls. All the while, the Santa Ynez Mountains rise behind them like a painted backdrop. This scene unfolds in Solvang every day, in Santa Barbara County wine country, a short drive over the hills from Santa Barbara.

Windmills and Dragons Along Copenhagen Drive

That courtyard tower comes with a backstory. As a schoolboy in Copenhagen, Paul Hanberg could visit the Round Tower for free on holidays, and he loved following its spiral ramp to the top for a view over the city. Years later, he got his hands on drawings of the tower he remembered. The replica he built in Solvang in 1991 stands at one-third scale, small enough to share a courtyard with the shops.

Head west on Copenhagen Drive until you reach the giant red clog outside the shoe store at First Street, then turn left onto First for the King Christian Tower. At first glance, the spire looks like a corkscrew. Get closer, and you'll make out four dragons with their tails twisted around one another. Local builder Ferd Sorensen borrowed the design from Copenhagen's old stock exchange. Back on Copenhagen Drive, one block farther west, the Blue Windmill marks Hamlet Square. This one you can actually walk into, and there's a scoop waiting inside at the Solvang Trolley Ice Cream Parlor.

A Danish Breakfast on the Bakery Block

Ice cream can wait, though. For breakfast, circle back to the Alisal end of Copenhagen Drive, where a scalloped red frame surrounds the sign for The Solvang Bakery. The Danish waffle here is a pastry meant to be eaten with your fingers. Bakers roll puff pastry in sugar and sandwich two crisp layers around raspberry jam and buttercream. The raspberry jam pulls double duty in the Danish layer cake, too, spread between layers of white cake with custard and marzipan beneath the whipped cream.

Down the same block, a painted sign over an arched doorway advertises Arne's aebleskiver. Solvang Restaurant on Copenhagen Drive serves these round pancakes warm, with raspberry jam and powdered sugar. Each spoonful of batter gets its own hollow in the pan, and the cook turns it again and again as it sets until it rounds out. During Danish Days, the town's annual celebration, local cooks have hauled supersized versions of those pans into the street to feed the crowds breakfast.

What's Behind the Shop Windows

Walk off breakfast a few doors down, where statues outside The Copenhagen House honor the educators who founded Solvang. The building used to be the Santa Ynez Valley Bank. These days its front door opens onto contemporary Danish housewares and jewelry. The same building houses the Solvang Viking Museum, home to Snorri and a second reproduction Viking ship, both made by shipbuilders at Denmark's Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde.

From Vikings, it's a short hop to fairy tales. The Book Loft, on Mission Drive, has been an independent bookstore since 1970, and its owners set aside space upstairs for a Hans Christian Andersen museum. One display shrinks the author's childhood home to model size. Another is a local artist's take on The Princess and the Pea. When you're done browsing, walk to the corner of Mission Drive and Alisal Road. Andersen's Little Mermaid sits in the fountain there, a half-size bronze copy of the statue on Copenhagen's waterfront.

Where the Valley Opens Up

From the mermaid, follow Mission Drive east to the edge of downtown, where the buildings run out, and one of Solvang's broadest views takes over. Old Mission Santa Inés stands on a rise above the Santa Ynez River Valley, and from the grounds you can see both the Santa Ynez and San Rafael mountain ranges across open country. Stick around for the walled garden bordered by an arcade, and for a museum with examples of Chumash craftsmanship. The mission was founded in 1804 on Chumash land, which made it more than a century old by the time Solvang's first Danish settlers arrived.

On the opposite side of downtown, Atterdag Road passes under a castle arch into Hans Christian Andersen Park. Just beyond the entrance, picnic tables sit under oaks along Adobe Creek. If you've got the legs for a short hike, pick up the path near the playground parking area. It climbs through oak woodland behind the tennis courts, with views back toward the Santa Ynez Mountains.

An Open-Air Stage Off Second Street

Back in the middle of town, just south of Copenhagen Drive on Second Street, sits proof that Solvang knows how to hustle. Local craftspeople and volunteers built the 700-seat Solvang Festival Theater in 58 days. It opened in 1974 with a stage that extends into the open-air auditorium and audiences seated on three sides. Fittingly, the first production was Once Upon a Mattress, the musical drawn from Andersen's story about a princess and a pea.

Today the Pacific Conservatory Theatre fills that stage with professional plays and musicals during its summer season. Pack a blanket for evening shows, since even summer nights get chilly here. The theater's garden doubles as a second, smaller venue, and on select summer Sundays audiences settle in among its mature trees for afternoon concerts on the terrace stage.

How Main Street Became Copenhagen Drive

To see how the whole production came together, head back to First Street, where a 1919 photograph shows a dirt road, modest wooden buildings, and a street with a much plainer name: Main Street. Danish immigrants had founded the town eight years earlier to establish a folk school. After World War II, merchants remodeled existing buildings, and new shops went up with steep gables and half-timbered fronts. In 1947, the Saturday Evening Post ran a feature on Solvang, and readers came to see the town while the work was still underway.

Details of that transformation are still overhead, so scan the roof ridges for ornamental storks, traditional symbols of good luck in Denmark. For one last look at the old town, walk a few blocks south to the Elverhøj Museum of History and Art, which artists Viggo and Martha Brandt-Erichsen built in the style of an 18th-century Danish farmhouse. Out back, a cottage in the garden displays a scale model of Solvang in the 1920s, decades before the windmill beside the bakery made today's Copenhagen Drive so easy to find.

Southern California's Danish Main Street

If you're looking for a Southern California main street that stays true to its character, Solvang's windmills, dragon spire, and warm aebleskiver set the scene on every block. Look past the set dressing, though, and the founders' statues and the 1920s model at the Elverhøj Museum reveal a Danish community with its own folk school long before it looked the part. For anyone hoping to step into a California scene made for the camera, Solvang is the rare set where the history behind the facades is as real as the scenery.