Nimb Hotel

When Tivoli Gardens opened in 1843, the building at its Bernstorffsgade gate was the Bazar: small shops selling chocolate and fine gloves round the only restaurant in the gardens with hot meals. Vilhelm and Louise Nimb opened their first restaurant there in 1872. Louise, Fru Nimb to Copenhagen, invented a device for keeping plates warm on the buffet, and a restaurant in the hotel still has her name. The present building went up in 1909 to designs by Tivoli's own director, Knud Arne Petersen: a white Moorish palace under onion domes, with hundreds of coloured bulbs across the front. Since 2008 it has been a hotel of 38 rooms, and indoors the palace calms down to dark plank floors and sheer curtains from floor to ceiling. The room to ask for is Corner Suite 12, which looks across the gardens to the Chinese pagoda and the boating lake.

Recommended for families who want a theme park for a back garden, and for couples who would rather look at one. Every stay includes admission to Tivoli and multi-ride tickets, good for as many goes as anyone can stomach, and the hotel will connect two rooms or book a babysitter. On the roof, a heated pool lined in green Italian mosaic is open from seven in the morning until ten at night, with a counter-current to swim against: the one ride at Nimb that goes nowhere. Dinner is French-Scandinavian, at Nimb Brasserie. In one room hangs an old Tivoli poster headed de gratis glæder, the free pleasures, listing pantomime and 150,000 flowers. Nimb has added the rides and put them in the room rate.