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Legovia’s high-speed rail system has turned the country’s isolated interior, with its historic castles and modern spaceport, from a near-mythical backwater into the hottest destination of the decade.
(See our Travel Team’s reviews: Lions and Falcons and Beers, Oh My! | 36 Hours in Orbit | Deals and Steals on the Translego Sleeper)
But this development has largely bypassed Lego City, turning it from the gateway to the bricklands into, for many visitors, nothing but a skyline glimpsed en route from the harbor or the airport to the station.
Their loss. Lego City—home to a bustling cultural scene, excellent food, and some of Europe’s most stunning architecture—is a great destination in its own right, and a not-to-be-missed day trip from Copenhagen, Lübeck, or Duplovsk. (Sorcha Lightfoot’s feature: Square and Steady: Fifty Years on the Duplo Ferry Line)
Here are our picks for what to do and see!
1.) A Picnic Lunch in Palace Square
There is no palace in Palace Square—the Winter Palace of the Grand Dukes of Legovia was burned down in the revolutions of 1848. In its place today, you’ll find the heart of Legovian cultural life, plus some of the best food trucks and market stalls in the city. Skip the tourist traps by the harbor: Take the B bus line to the top of the hill and eat like a local! For sit-down meals, the streets around the square are home to some excellent cafés and a very good Parisian restaurant. (Jane Drinker’s review: Square Meals Are Hip at Chez Albert)
2025
They’d programmed Legovia and Duplovna for the same night, with Greece in between. The presenters, ten bricks high on the screen covering the museum facade, made lots of jokes about separating the brick bloc, tee hee. It was drizzling; their projected faces blurred across the mist.
Legovia’s entry was in English like last year’s, slick and overproduced, and all Nina’s photos of the damp crowd in the plaza seemed soulless, plastic. And then Duplovna came out in folk costume—the old-fashioned square gowns, all starch and no sleeves—and sang in Duplovnan, albeit with a chorus that was mostly la la la.
And which was, unfortunately, an absolute banger.
After that the sky opened and the square emptied of all but the die-hards. People were singing the Duplovnan chorus when Nina went for a crepe, and still humming it ten minutes later when she reached the head of the line. “Well, there’s our chance gone,” she sighed to the vendor. Her boss was pinging her again; she slipped the phone back into her pocket. “Unless Italy completely eats dirt, I suppose.”
The vendor’s voice was all skepticism. “Do you want to host Eurovision?”
“Yes? I work for the tourist bureau.”
“Ah.” A world of disdain in that syllable. He poured out a new swirl of batter and swept it into a precise circle. “Toppings? Fillings?”
“Jam and Nutella. And it’s not so much losing as losing to the Dupes, you know?”
“Not really. My grandmother is Duplovnan.”
“Oh.” Nina stopped herself just in time from saying you don’t look it.
The vendor shrugged. “We’re Danish Duplovnik. Lot of intermarriage up in Billund. Up there, us, you, we’re all just brickniks to them.”
“What brings you to Lego City, then? If it’s not the tourist economy.”
He snorted. “The usual story. Came for architecture school, never left.” He folded the crepe, smeared one half red and the other brown, folded it again. “Seven studs.”
She paid, ducked under the side of the awning where it was dry. “Sorry for before,” she said. “If we don’t make the final I will vote for Duplovna. I always do.”
“You’d wish hosting on Duplovna? Despot! The Falcon Knights of old have nothing on you.” His expression wasn’t the changeable kind, but there might have been a smile in his voice.
Nina’s phone was still buzzing and her spreadsheet still had nineteen things to upload, post, tweet, or skeet before the end of the program; but the crepe was steaming and sticky and wonderfully sweet. “Well,” she said, “we brickniks ought to stick together.”
[Download build instructions: Crepe Stand]
2.) The Natural History Museum
The museum (1870) and botanical garden (1885) were the passion and life’s work of the controversial Grand Duke and Count Palatine Robrick. A divisive figure, as loved in Duplovna as he is loathed in Legovia—the two thrones were briefly joined under a personal union in the late nineteenth century—even the Legovians have to concede his flawless taste in architecture (though they took his portrait off the building in 1919). Take a moment to appreciate the statuary before buying your ticket for the small but excellent collection. The dinosaur is justly famous, but don’t let it overshadow the museum’s other gems: The Kristina Ammonite, a diplomatic gift from Sweden; a comprehensive history of the Legovian aerospace industry; and mineral specimens from Robrick’s Wunderkammer.
(Joint ticket to the museum and botanical garden 5 studs; students and seniors free; free admission on Wednesday and Sunday late opening nights after 16:00h and on Legovian Constitution Day.)
1967
Dmitri lingered at the bus stop after disembarking, tying his shoes and patting his pockets as if absentmindedly, watching which of his fellow passengers entered the museum, wondering whether any of them were his contact. The shipping magnate’s secretary? The Duplovnan Customs House clerk? The elderly lady waiting patiently behind a flock of schoolchildren to see the head of the brickiosaur?
But it was none of them; his counterpart had come in person, on foot or by the previous bus. He was standing in front of the satellite, hands in his pockets, failing to look like anything but what he was—former military, active agent, hopelessly American.
“You know—” he began.
“Oh, I know many things,” interrupted Dmitri. “For instance, I know that the apple harvest promises to be late this year.”
“Then the cider will be all the sweeter,” his counterpart replied, with the wooden inflection of a man who had never drunk anything but watery beer and worse whiskey. “As I was saying—you know, they can put cameras on these things now that have a resolution of two by two studs?”
“Is that so?” Both of their governments, in fact, had single-stud resolution capacity, as he knew they both knew.
“They can see all sorts of things. Weather patterns. Ocean currents. Missile silos rising out of the Legovian forest.”
“Oh, surely not missiles.” Dmitri shook his head. “I hardly think the Legovians would make such a show of aggression.”
“But—”
“Now, rockets. Those I may grant you.”
“Fine. Rockets, then. Rockets which could threaten Boston, maybe New York—not to mention all of Europe, of course.”
“You think far too parochially,” said Dmitri. “Set your sights a little higher.”
“Washington?”
“Higher, I said.”
It took a moment; then he started. “A cosmodrome?”
Dmitri studied the satellite. Its surfaces reflected the brickiosaur’s massive toothy grin from a dozen angles.
“Here,” the American persisted, “not in Duplovna? But why?”
“Because the Legovians asked.”
“But Legovia is neutral.”
“That is why they needed to ask.”
“But what do they get out of it?”
“They get a cosmodrome,” he said patiently. “And the roads leading to it. I cannot say, of course, which was the prime minister’s chief concern.”
The school group had grown, impossibly, louder; his counterpart’s face loomed suddenly closer in the satellite’s mirrored faces. “And your government?”
“We get the famous Legovian engineering. Even my government,” he admitted, “must recognize the uniqueness of Legovian technology.”
The American huffed, horselike, a strikingly animal movement in this room of metal and bones. “A triumph of mutual aid.”
“You think so? I would have said, the free market at work.” The schoolchildren suddenly rose up like a flock of swallows and came roiling down the corridor. “Now, if you will excuse me. I am told one must not leave without viewing the brickiosaurus.”
[Download build instructions: Bus Stop]
3.) The Botanical Garden
Pay the extra two studs to get the self-guided audio tour of this stunning conservatory, available in six languages with more on the way. The docent let us in on a tip—you can leave your ID at the desk to take the headphones outside and hear a full audio tour of the flower gardens in the square! Beautiful (and fragrant), they are also a part of the garden and feature many plants with medicinal or folkloric significance.
1918
The flower beds in the square were a mess of straw mulch and bare mud, last year’s potatoes all harvested and this year’s not yet planted. Katrin had wanted to start cold-hardy annuals in the conservatory—pansies and violas could go in between the potato rows, could bloom until the garden began to green—but Lady Brickard had given a firm no. One must, she said, consider appearances—“and for the conservatory as well.”
Katrin had thought the appearance of old ladies enjoying the warmth was sufficient to justify the fuel; but coal and petrol both were scarce now even for the Grand Duke, and over the winter the wooded slopes above Lego City had noticeably thinned.
For this morning at least, the steam pipes were still groaning and rattling, but a cold draft snaked through the damp heat; and in the bed under the date palm there were glass shards.
Lady Brickard would go completely to pieces. Katrin ought to close up and go inform her immediately. Instead, before even picking the glass out of the soil, she ran to the coffee tree and inspected each branch for breakage. But there was none, and every cluster of swelling berries that had been there last night still hung on the branch.
The coffee tree might survive winter with the heating shut off. The berries would certainly not ripen. There had been no coffee in the markets for a year now; this little harvest would more than keep the boiler stoked until April, if Lady Brickard were only willing to deal with black marketeers.
Little hope of that.
Still. Even the few beans Katrin might harvest unnoticed would mean food, petrol, medicine, all the thousand things even neutral Legovia could not procure, if only the heat stayed on.
She turned around at a noise and there he was, the intruder, hoping no doubt to slip out the door behind her. Or maybe just tired of hiding—he was pale in the February dawn, unshaven. Though he did not look Duplovnan to Katrin’s eyes, the Duplovnan uniform hung loosely on his torso.
She should have grabbed a spade. Her fist closed around the little paper packet that was no kind of weapon at all.
“Deserter?” He shook his head. “What else are you, then?” He shook his head again and she realized he did not speak Legovian. Katrin’s Duplovnan was little better. She tried Danish; he tried Russian, and something else she could not even recognize; but in the end all they had in common was a halting German.
“It pains me,” he said, repeating it several times before Katrin remembered how German did apologies. “I go now. I sleep here, I sleep in the warm, but I go now.”
The sun was rising; the square would be filling up with people. “Go where?” said Katrin. “Duplovna, they shoot deserters, true?” Lady Brickard, if she knew a vagrant had broken in for shelter, would have the boiler shut off at once.
The man shrugged, as if he had used up all of his caring.
Katrin took off her canvas smock and tossed it at him. “Here.” She gestured at him to put it on; it covered the uniform jacket, more or less.
“You know gardens?” she said. “You know potatoes, turnips, beets?” She pulled a crumpled paper packet out of her pocket. “Cucumbers,” she continued in Legovian, “aubergines? Tomatoes?” She opened the packet and let him see inside, the hoarded seeds, poor growers in Legovia’s brief and foggy summers—outdoors, at least.
The man looked and smiled, suddenly and brilliantly, and unleashed a spate of rapid and incomprehensible Duplovnan. “Yes, all right,” she said in Legovian, and opened the tool locker.
[Download build instructions: Flower Garden]
4.) Sunset from the Clock Tower
The only part of the Winter Palace to survive the fire, this 14th-century tower has a 16th-century clock, still functional. Access to the clock chamber is free with your museum ticket. Save the tower for last—it’s open until 19:00h, two hours after museum closing, and the view of the sunset on the harbor is well worth the stairs.
One tip—if you’re going to be there when the hour strikes, bring ear protection! The bell can be heard all the way to the harbor.
1848
“Time was,” said the sailor, “the Forest Men would never have let an army this close to the City. Not even a Legovian army.” On the ridge, the ensigns of the Yellow Falcon horse had been joined by the Blue Falcon foot and the lion standards of the Body Guards.
The sailor had been with them since the harbor, on watch in the clock chamber since the night before; Tadze had forgotten about him, but of course Nils had remembered. “I’m here to relieve you. Nils says to get some sleep. And there are no more Forest Men, if there ever were—there’s no one in the deep woods but swineherds and charcoal-burners.”
“And where are the charcoal burners, then? That’s a good revolutionary occupation. There are Carbonari in Italy again, they say.” He knew a lot about politics, the sailor, or claimed to. He said he had been in France, and maybe he had.
“I wouldn’t know,” said Tadze. “But—here, if you’re not going to sleep, maybe you can explain something to me. What about your republic is worth dying for?”
The sailor reached for his carbine.
“Look, I’m with you! Or—I’m with Nils. I’m his friend, and I’m not going to leave him. But I don’t understand him.”
The sailor gave him an assessing look, but he subsided. “You don’t understand why a man wants freedom?”
“From what? Independence from an empire, that I can understand, but Francis released his vassals in my grandfather’s day. Legovia has its independence—what does it matter if it has a Grand Duchess in the palace or, I don’t know, a president or something?”
The clock tocked ponderously, both hands juddering. “You’re a student. Architecture?”
“Law.”
“Duplovnan?”
He had taken to Legovian clothes immediately, the printed waistcoats that might have been painted on, but his accent had been harder to shed.
“Yes. Taddeus—Tadze.” The sailor doesn’t offer his name—had not offered it yet, which made Tadze think perhaps he did know what he was about.
“You’ve grown up under Count Nikolas, and you ask what it matters?”
“All right, in Duplovna, I will concede, there have been some terrible Counts. But here in Legostadt—”
“Lego. City.”
“—here, the Grand Duchess may rule in name, but three Legovians in five live here in the City, where you have an elected mayor—elected by all men of means, whatever their birth. Your Duchess knows she has not the power to overrule him on serious matters—she does not even have the forces to retake her own palace, yet here they are gathered all the same. Why engage them? Why set Legovian against Legovian, when you have already so much freedom?”
The sailor looked into the distance, brow knitted, and Tadze thought for certain he was about to be dressed down at high revolutionary volume; and then he followed the man’s gaze out the opposite window. There on the horizon, not yet in the harbor, sails were massing.
The sailor sprang up and grabbed the bell-rope. Above their heads the bell clanged, clanged again, a rapid and deafening tocsin. And then a great many things seemed to happen at once.
It was later—after Nils darted up the stairs to see for himself, and down again with his face hard; after someone in the vestibule took hold of the rope and took over the tocsin; after someone else pressed a rifle into Tadze’s hand—that the sailor called across the clock chamber, somehow audible over and under the alarm bell, “Look. Whoever those sails are, they want one thing—to foist a husband on the Grand Duchess. A republic must be conquered by force; a coronet can be taken in a drawing room—bequeathed, endowed, given, traded—you understand?”
Tadze looked out over the lower City and the harbor. He looked again. “But the sails—” he cried.
“Look, it doesn’t matter who it is,” the sailor bellowed back. “Some cadet Hohenzollern or Nassau, some back-of-the-blanket Hapsburg—some Marshal of France like in Sweden—”
“But it’s none of them,” Tadze cried. “It’s none of those.” The ships were in the harbor now, sun gleaming on the square lines and bright colors of home. “It’s Duplovna.”
[Download build instructions: Clock Tower]
Looking for what to do after dark in Lego City? We’ve got you covered!
Old-Time Jazz in the Old Town | Our Favorite British Pubs in Europe and Beyond | My Retro Writing Retreat in A Sleepy Boutique Hotel | Golden Age Silver Screen Glamour at the Palace | Pool Halls, Diners, and Dives: Lego City on Ten Studs or Less