Parque Frederiksberg

Frederiksberg Park (Frederiksberg Have) is one of the largest and most attractive greenspaces in Copenhagen area, Denmark, located in Frederiksberg Municipality. Together with the adjacent Søndermarken it forms a green area of 64 hectares at the western edge of Inner Copenhagen. It is a romantic landscape garden designed in English style.

Frederiksberg Park was established by King Frederik IV in connecton with the construction of Frederiksberg Palace as his new summer retreat on high grounds atop Valby Hill. Work on the project began in the 1690s with inspiration from France. King Frederick commissioned the eminent Swedish architect Nicodemus Tessin to draw a proposal. The plan involved a parterre with a complex system of cascades on the sloping terrain in front of the new palace. It was fed by a complicated but inefficient system of pumps which never came to work properly. In the end, Johan Cornelius Krieger, who was at the time also working on an extension and adaption of Fredensborg Palace north of Copenhagen, was called upon to redesign the parterre. Unusually of the time, he gave up the parterre completely and instead transformed the slope into a series of terraces.

In about 1800, as fashion changed, the park was adapted into an English landscape garden.

The rest of Frederiksberg Garden has been remodelled as a scenic garden with winding lawns, lakes, canals and spinneys as well as grottos, temples, pavilions and summerhouses. It may well have been based on Johan Ludwig Mansa's book on English-style gardening written in 1798.

The Palace garden was particularly used by Frederik VI who spend much time in the grounds and sailing the canals in a gondola. Though a palace park, the general public had access to the grounds but sailors, dogs and people in poor clothing or carrying large bundles were turned away by the guard at the parks sole entrance. Not until 1865 became access to the park unrestricted, in line with what was the case elsewhere in the city such as at Langelinie.

When in 2008 Norman Foster in collaboration with the Danish landscape architect Stig L. Andersson designed the new Elephant House for the adjacent Copenhagen Zoo, it was done as an extension of Frederiksberg Park. A three-metre high wall that once separated the two has been replaced by a simple fence, so that visitors in the public park can now watch the elephants. It means that the elephants have distant views as well.