Karen Blixen Museum, Rungstedlund

Rungstedlund, home of the Karen Blixen Museum, is the manor where one of Denmark's most celebrated authors was born, wrote her greatest work, and was finally laid to rest. Karen Blixen (1885-1962), who published in English under the pen name Isak Dinesen, is best known for "Out of Africa" and "Seven Gothic Tales." The white, wing-shaped house on the Øresund coast in Rungsted, about 24 kilometres north of Copenhagen, has been a museum since 1991 and is run by the Rungstedlund Foundation, which Blixen herself helped establish to preserve the estate and its surrounding parkland.

The property has a long history predating Blixen. In the 18th century it served as an inn, and the poet Johannes Ewald lodged here in the 1770s, immortalising the place in his poem "Rungsteds Lyksaligheder" (The Blisses of Rungsted). Blixen's father, the officer and writer Wilhelm Dinesen, bought the estate in 1879, and Karen was born here six years later. After her famous but financially ruinous years running a coffee farm in British East Africa, today's Kenya, and the loss of her lover Denys Finch Hatton in a plane crash, she returned to Rungstedlund in 1931 and lived there for the rest of her life, writing in the very rooms visitors walk through today.

The museum preserves her private quarters much as she left them: the study where she wrote at a small desk, her library, and rooms furnished with paintings, flowers and African objects brought home from Kenya. A permanent exhibition traces her life, her writing and her formidable literary reputation. She was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Ernest Hemingway remarked when he won it that Blixen deserved it more than he did.

The grounds are as much a draw as the house. The park is a protected bird sanctuary that Blixen campaigned to establish, crisscrossed today by walking paths through old trees, meadows and along the shore. At the foot of Ewalds Høj, a small rise named after the poet, Karen Blixen is buried under a great beech tree, her grave marked only by a simple flat stone, so quiet and unassuming that many visitors walk past it.

A visit is calm and unhurried. Most people spend around an hour and a half between the house, the exhibition and the park. The ground floor and exhibition are largely wheelchair accessible, while the historic upper-floor rooms are reached by stairs; there is a café, a bookshop and an accessible toilet. The house is open daily from 1 May to 30 September, and on a reduced schedule the rest of the year, closed on Mondays in winter.

Late spring and summer are the finest seasons, when the garden blooms, migratory birds fill the reserve and the house keeps its longest hours. Rungsted lies about 24 kilometres north of Copenhagen. The easiest route is the Kystbanen coastal train from Copenhagen Central toward Helsingør; get off at Rungsted Kyst Station and walk roughly ten minutes through the bird sanctuary to the museum. By car, follow Strandvejen, the coastal road, where free parking is available; cycling along the shore is a lovely alternative, and you can bring your bike on the train.