Feast of the Constitution of Kingdom of Denmark

Denmark, country occupying the peninsula of Jutland (Jylland), which extends northward from the centre of continental western Europe, and an archipelago of more than 400 islands to the east of the peninsula. Jutland makes up more than two-thirds of the country’s total land area; at its northern tip is the island of Vendsyssel-Thy (1,809 square miles [4,685 square km]), separated from the mainland by the Lim Fjord. The largest of the country’s islands are Zealand (Sjælland; 2,715 square miles [7,031 square km]), Vendsyssel-Thy, and Funen (Fyn; 1,152 square miles [2,984 square km]). Along with Norway and Sweden, Denmark is a part of the northern European region known as Scandinavia. The country’s capital, Copenhagen (København), is located primarily on Zealand; the second largest city, Århus, is the major urban centre of Jutland. Though small in territory and population, Denmark has nonetheless played a notable role in European history. In prehistoric times, Danes and other Scandinavians reconfigured European society when the Vikings undertook marauding, trading, and colonizing expeditions. During the Middle Ages, the Danish crown dominated northwestern Europe through the power of the Kalmar Union. In later centuries, shaped by geographic conditions favouring maritime industries, Denmark established trading alliances throughout northern and western Europe and beyond, particularly with Great Britain and the United States. Making an important contribution to world culture, Denmark also developed humane governmental institutions and cooperative, nonviolent approaches to problem solving. This article covers principally the land and people of continental Denmark. However, the Kingdom of Denmark also encompasses the Faroe Islands and the island of Greenland, both located in the North Atlantic Ocean. Each area is distinctive in history, language, and culture. Home rule was granted to the Faroes in 1948 and to Greenland in 1979, though foreign policy and defense remain under Danish control. Land Denmark is attached directly to continental Europe at Jutland’s 42-mile (68-km) boundary with Germany. Other than this connection, all the frontiers with surrounding countries are maritime, including that with the United Kingdom to the west across the North Sea. Norway and Sweden lie to the north, separated from Denmark by sea lanes linking the North Sea to the Baltic Sea. From west to east, these passages are called the Skagerrak, the Kattegat, and The Sound (Øresund). Eastward in the Baltic Sea lies the Danish island of Bornholm. Relief Denmark proper is a lowland area that lies, on average, not more than 100 feet (30 metres) above sea level. The country’s highest point, reaching only 568 feet (173 metres), is Yding Forest Hill (Yding Skovhøj) in east-central Jutland. The basic contours of the Danish landscape were shaped at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch (i.e., about 2,600,000 to 11,700 years ago) by the so-called Weichsel glaciation. This great glacial mass withdrew temporarily during several warmer interstadial periods, but it repeatedly returned to cover the land until it retreated to the Arctic north for the last time about 10,000 years ago. As a result, the barren layers of chalk and limestone that earlier constituted the land surface acquired a covering of soil that built up as the Weichsel retreated, forming low, hilly, and generally fertile moraines that diversify the otherwise flat landscape. A scenic boundary representing the extreme limit reached by the Scandinavian and Baltic ice sheets runs from Nissum Fjord on the western coast of Jutland eastward toward Viborg, from there swinging sharply south down the spine of the peninsula toward Åbenrå and the German city of Flensburg, just beyond the Danish frontier. The ice front is clearly marked in the contrast between the flat western Jutland region, composed of sands and gravels strewn by meltwaters that poured west from the shrinking ice sheet, and the fertile loam plains and hills of eastern and northern Denmark, which become markedly sandier toward the prehistoric ice front. (See also Scandinavian Ice Sheet.) In northern Jutland, where the long Lim Fjord separates the northern tip (Vendsyssel-Thy) from the rest of the peninsula, there are numerous flat areas of sand and gravel, some of which became stagnant bogs. Burials and ritual deposits interred in these bogs in antiquity—especially during the Bronze Age and the Iron Age—have been recovered by archaeologists. In more recent centuries these bogs were a valued source of peat for fuel. In the 20th century they were drained to serve as grazing areas for livestock. In places along the northern and southwestern coasts of Jutland, salt marshes were formed by the evaporation of an inland sea that existed during the late Permian Epoch (approximately 260 to 250 million years ago). Senonian chalk, deposited about 100 million years ago, is exposed in southeastern Zealand, at the base of Stevns Cliff (Stevns Klint) and Møns Cliff (Møns Klint), and at Bulbjerg, in northwestern Jutland. Younger limestone of the Danian Age (about 65 million years old) is quarried in southeastern Zealand. On Bornholm, outcroppings reveal close affinities with geologic formations in southern Sweden. Precambrian granites more than 570 million years old—among the oldest on the Earth’s surface—are exposed across extensive areas on the northern half of the island. On the southern half, sandstone and shales of the Cambrian Period (about 540 to 490 million years ago) overlie the older granites. Drainage The longest river in Denmark is the Gudenå. It flows a distance of 98 miles (158 km) from its source just northwest of Tørring, in east-central Jutland, through the Silkeborg Lakes (Silkeborg Langsø) and then northeast to empty in the Randers Fjord on the east coast. There are many small lakes; the largest is Arresø on Zealand. Large lagoons have formed behind the coastal dunes in the west, such as at the Ringkøbing and Nissum fjords. More … Score: https://www.britannica.com/place/Denmark

2026/06/05

10 Beautiful Places to Visit in Denmark 🇩🇰 | Denmark Travel Video

2026/06/04

Official Website for Tourism in Italy

Italia.it è un portale internet dedicato alla promozione turistica dell'Italia via Internet. Voluto dal governo Berlusconi III, è diventato celebre a causa.

2026/06/04

Welcome to Samoa | Pacific Island Holiday | Official Guide

Samoa is truly paradise on earth, with its warm culture, breathtaking sceneries and easy access. Come visit us and experience a true beautiful holiday.

2026/06/03

Anniversary of the Proclamation of the Republic Italian Republic

Italy, country of south-central Europe, occupying a peninsula that juts deep into the Mediterranean Sea. Italy comprises some of the most varied and scenic landscapes on Earth and is often described as a country shaped like a boot. At its broad top stand the Alps, which are among the world’s most rugged mountains. Italy’s highest points are along Monte Rosa, which peaks in Switzerland, and along Mont Blanc, which peaks in France. The western Alps overlook a landscape of Alpine lakes and glacier-carved valleys that stretch down to the Po River and the Piedmont. Tuscany, to the south of the cisalpine region, is perhaps the country’s best-known region. From the central Alps, running down the length of the country, radiates the tall Apennine Range, which widens near Rome to cover nearly the entire width of the Italian peninsula. South of Rome the Apennines narrow and are flanked by two wide coastal plains, one facing the Tyrrhenian Sea and the other the Adriatic Sea. Much of the lower Apennine chain is near-wilderness, hosting a wide range of species rarely seen elsewhere in western Europe, such as wild boars, wolves, asps, and bears. The southern Apennines are also tectonically unstable, with several active volcanoes, including Vesuvius, which from time to time belches ash and steam into the air above Naples and its island-strewn bay. At the bottom of the country, in the Mediterranean Sea, lie the islands of Sicily and Sardinia. Italy’s political geography has been conditioned by this rugged landscape. With few direct roads between them, and with passage from one point to another traditionally difficult, Italy’s towns and cities have a history of self-sufficiency, independence, and mutual mistrust. Visitors today remark on how unlike one town is from the next, on the marked differences in cuisine and dialect, and on the many subtle divergences that make Italy seem less a single nation than a collection of culturally related points in an uncommonly pleasing setting. Across a span of more than 3,000 years, Italian history has been marked by episodes of temporary unification and long separation, of intercommunal strife and failed empires. At peace for more than half a century now, Italy’s inhabitants enjoy a high standard of living and a highly developed culture. Though its archaeological record stretches back tens of thousands of years, Italian history begins with the Etruscans, an ancient civilization that rose between the Arno and Tiber rivers. The Etruscans were supplanted in the 3rd century bce by the Romans, who soon became the chief power in the Mediterranean world and whose empire stretched from India to Scotland by the 2nd century ce. That empire was rarely secure, not only because of the unwillingness of conquered peoples to stay conquered but also because of power struggles between competing Roman political factions, military leaders, families, ethnic groups, and religions. The Roman Empire fell in the 5th century ce after a succession of barbarian invasions through which Huns, Lombards, Ostrogoths, and Franks—mostly previous subjects of Rome—seized portions of Italy. Rule devolved to the level of the city-state, although the Normans succeeded in establishing a modest empire in southern Italy and Sicily in the 11th century. Many of those city-states flourished during the Renaissance era, a time marked by significant intellectual, artistic, and technological advances but also by savage warfare between states loyal to the pope and those loyal to the Holy Roman Empire. Italian unification came in the 19th century, when a liberal revolution installed Victor Emmanuel II as king. In World War I, Italy fought on the side of the Allies, but, under the rule of the fascist leader Benito Mussolini, it waged war against the Allied powers in World War II. From the end of World War II to the early 1990s, Italy had a multiparty system dominated by two large parties: the Christian Democratic Party (Partito della Democrazia Cristiana; DC) and the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano; PCI). In the early 1990s the Italian party system underwent a radical transformation, and the political centre collapsed, leaving a right-left polarization of the party spectrum that threw the north-south divide into sharper contrast and gave rise to such political leaders as media magnate Silvio Berlusconi. The whole country is relatively prosperous, certainly as compared with the early years of the 20th century, when the economy was predominantly agricultural. Much of that prosperity has to do with tourism, for in good years nearly as many visitors as citizens can be found in the country. Italy is part of the European Union and the Council of Europe, and, with its strategic geographic position on the southern flank of Europe, it has played a fairly important role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The capital is Rome, one of the oldest of the world’s great cities and a favourite of visitors, who go there to see its great monuments and works of art as well as to enjoy the city’s famed dolce vita, or "sweet life." Other major cities include the industrial and fashion centre of Milan; Genoa, a handsome port on the Ligurian Gulf; the sprawling southern metropolis of Naples; and Venice, one of the world’s oldest tourist destinations. Surrounded by Rome is an independent state, Vatican City, which is the seat of the Roman Catholic Church and the spiritual home of Italy’s overwhelmingly Catholic population. Each of those cities, and countless smaller cities and towns, has retained its differences against the leveling effect of the mass media and standardized education. Thus, many Italians, particularly older ones, are inclined to think of themselves as belonging to families, then neighbourhoods, then towns or cities, then regions, and then, last, as members of a nation. The intellectual and moral faculties of humankind have found a welcome home in Italy, one of the world’s most important centres of religion, visual arts, literature, music, philosophy, culinary arts, and sciences. Michelangelo, the painter and sculptor, believed that his work was to free an already existing image; Giuseppe Verdi heard the voices of the ancients and of angels in music that came to him in his dreams; Dante forged a new language with his incomparable poems of heaven, hell, and the world between. Those and many other Italian artists, writers, designers, musicians, chefs, actors, and filmmakers have brought extraordinary gifts to the world. This article treats the physical and human geography and history of Italy. For discussion of Classical history, see the articles ancient Italic people and ancient Rome.   More … Score: https://www.britannica.com/place/Italy

2026/06/02

Independence Day of the Independent State of Samoa

Samoa, country in the central South Pacific Ocean, among the westernmost of the island countries of Polynesia. According to legend, Samoa is known as the “Cradle of Polynesia” because Savai‘i island is said to be Hawaiki, the Polynesian homeland. Samoan culture is undoubtedly central to Polynesian life, and its styles of music, dance, and visual art have gained renown throughout the Pacific islands and the world. The country’s international image is that of a tropical paradise inhabited by tourist-friendly flower-wreathed peoples. Yet this belies the economic, social, and political challenges of this diverse and evolving Pacific microstate. Samoa gained its independence from New Zealand in 1962 after more than a century of foreign influence and domination, but it remains a member of the Commonwealth. The country was known as Western Samoa until 1997. Its capital and main commercial centre is Apia, on the island of Upolu. Land Samoa lies approximately 80 miles (130 km) west of American Samoa, 1,800 miles (2,900 km) northeast of New Zealand, and 2,600 miles (4,200 km) southwest of Hawaii. Samoa, which shares the Samoan archipelago with American Samoa, consists of nine islands west of longitude 171° W—Upolu, Savai‘i, Manono, and Apolima, all of which are inhabited, and the uninhabited islands of Fanuatapu, Namu‘a, Nu‘utele, Nu‘ulua, and Nu‘usafee. (The six Samoan islands east of the meridian are part of American Samoa.) The total land area is smaller than the U.S. state of Rhode Island but about 2.5 times larger than Hong Kong. Relief and drainage Savai‘i, the largest island, covers 659 square miles (1,707 square km) and rises to a maximum elevation of 6,095 feet (1,858 metres) at Mount Silisili, a volcano at the island’s approximate centre. Mounts Māfane, Mata‘aga, and Maugaloa are also imposing peaks. Upolu, the other large island, lies about 10 miles (16 km) to the east across the Apolima Strait. Upolu is more elongated and uneven in shape than Savai‘i and has lower average elevations. It occupies an area of 432 square miles (1,119 square km), including five offshore islets, and rises to 3,608 feet (1,100 metres) at Mount Fito. Manono and Apolima are smaller islands lying in the strait between the two main islands. All the country’s rivers are shallow, are limited in extent, and radiate directly from the central highlands to the coast. The islands are rocky, formed by volcanic activity that progressed from east to west within the past seven million years. They are ringed by coral reefs and shallow lagoons except where the shorelines are marked by cliffs formed by lava flows. Mount Matavanu on Savai‘i last erupted intermittently during 1905–11. Samoa’s volcanic soils support lush vegetation but are easily eroded by runoff. Climate The climate is tropical and humid. Precipitation varies from more than 100 inches (2,540 mm) on the northern and western coasts to 300 inches (7,620 mm) inland. Temperatures vary little, averaging 80 °F (27 °C) and ranging between 73 and 86 °F (23 and 30 °C) throughout the year. The southeast trade winds prevail, varying occasionally to northerlies during the wet season (November or December to April), when severe storms are liable to occur. Typhoons occasionally cause widespread damage. Plant and animal life Samoa’s lush vegetation includes inland rainforests and cloud forests. Large sections of the coast have been covered with taro plantations and coconut groves. The islands support limited animal life, although more than 50 species of birds are found there, at least 16 of them indigenous, including rare tooth-billed pigeons. The only native mammals are flying foxes, which are endangered, and other species of smaller bats. Rats, wild cattle, and pigs have been introduced. Among the smaller animals found in Samoa are several species of lizards, two snakes of the boa family, centipedes and millipedes, scorpions, spiders, and a wide variety of insects. O Le Pupu Pue National Park (1978), Samoa’s first national park, occupies some 11 square miles (28 square km) on south-central Upolu. Conservation efforts have been lax in many Samoan communities. Soil erosion, resulting from farming steep slopes and clear-cutting forests, has produced runoff that has damaged many of Samoa’s lagoons and coral reefs. Industrial and residential pollution has become a concern in and around Apia. Wildfires in 1998, which were started by farmers clearing land for cultivation, destroyed nearly one-fourth of the forests on Savai‘i. People of Samoa Ethnic groups Samoans are mainly of Polynesian heritage, and about nine-tenths of the population are ethnic Samoans. Euronesians (people of mixed European and Polynesian ancestry) account for most of the rest of the population, and a tiny fraction are of wholly European heritage. Languages Samoan is the country’s official language; legislative activity is conducted in both Samoan and English as required by the constitution. Samoan is believed to be among the oldest of the Polynesian tongues and is closely related to the Maori, Tahitian, Hawaiian, and Tongan languages. A large number of Samoan words reflect maritime traditions, including names for ocean currents, winds, landforms, stars, and directions. Some verb forms indicate the relative positions of objects, including directions of movement toward or away from the speaker. English is widely spoken as a second language. Religion Samoans traditionally had a pantheistic religion, where family elders performed most rituals; they appear not to have had a dominant priestly class. They readily adopted Christian teachings following European contact, and even the more remote villages built churches, often of grand proportions. The Congregational Christian Church of Samoa (Ekalesia Faapotopotoga Kerisiano Samoa [EKFS]; formerly the London Missionary Society) is the dominant religion, with slightly less than one-third of the population. Approximately one-fifth of Samoans are Roman Catholics, and Latter-day Saints constitute about one-sixth of the population. Methodists make up one-eighth. Pentecostals, Assemblies of God, and other Christian groups have more-limited memberships. Demographic trends The birth rate in Samoa has been high since the 1950s, when the population reached about 80,000. Although that number had doubled by the mid-1990s, the population’s rate of increase remained markedly lower than the world average because tens of thousands of Samoans had emigrated to New Zealand, the United States, Australia, and elsewhere. Life expectancy at birth is 67 years for males and 72 for females. About one-third of Samoans are less than 15 years old. Economy Close kinship ties within the villages traditionally bound Samoans into a collectivist society, but a cash economy developed following European contact, mainly based on agricultural exports. Tourism, services, and light manufacturing became increasingly important after 1950. Other major sources of capital now include remittances from Samoans living abroad (mainly in the United States and New Zealand), which account for as much as one-sixth of household income, and grants from the United States, the United Nations, the Commonwealth, and other foreign entities. Agriculture, forestry, and fishing Agriculture accounts for two-fifths of Samoa’s gross domestic product (GDP) and nearly two-thirds of the workforce; however, production does not meet local demand, and large quantities of food are imported. Major crops include coconuts, taro, pineapples, mangoes, and other fruits. Typhoons caused widespread damage in the 1990s to several crops, including taro, which was also devastated by taro leaf blight. Cattle, pigs, and poultry are raised for local consumption. Forestry has made increasing contributions to the economy, partly because of the government’s replanting programs. The Samoan fishing industry remains small, based primarily on catches made from outrigger canoes. More … Source: https://www.britannica.com/place/Samoa-island-nation-Pacific-Ocean/People

2026/06/01

Introducing Italy with Audley Travel

Get inspired for your trip to Italy, where you can see Roman ruins, candle-lit cathedrals, Renaissance palaces and luxe villas overlooking vineyards

2026/06/01

Beautiful Samoa: The cradle of Polynesia

We spent time on both of Samoa’s two main islands—Upolu and Savai’i—and dove off of Manono Island, which is found in between. Both main islands have incredible swimming holes, including at the base of enormous tropical waterfalls, as well as lagoons, lava fields, blowholes, and pristine beaches...not to mention some world-class surf breaks.

2026/05/31

Ethiopia - Land of Origins | Ministry of Tourism Official Website

The most popular attractions to visit in your lifetime ; Aksum – Land of Queen Sheba ; Lalibela. The rock hewen churches of Lalibela ; Gondar Fasil Castle. Gondar .

2026/05/30