Small town at the fjord

Along the east coast of Jutland you find several fjords and one of these fjords is Mariager Fjord which is a pretty area where you drive the road along the fjord and enjoy the view. At the middle of Mariager Fjord you find a small town called Mariager.

It is an old town with a long history – the town isn’t very big and it has remained small over the centuries. This is a good thing this way new development hasn’t led to a need to tear down all the old house down and in the center there are many old houses along the cobbled streets.

The area here has actually been pretty important about a thousand years ago – down in the bottom of the fjord you find the remains of the ancient Viking ring fortress Fyrkat just outside the city of Hobro which is the main town at the end of Mariager Fjord.

We wonder around the pretty old town and enjoy several of the old houses along the cobbled street – the city never reach more than a few thousand inhabitant so the central area of the town is fairly small so most people can easily walk around here as long as you don’t bring your heals which isn’t really suitable for the cobble stones.

In one of the streets we see an old house which houses the restaurant Aporta. The restaurant became infamous last year because the owner were a member of the Danish parliament and the in the subcommittee of transportation. In this function he managed to get a road approved around Mariager which according to him were suffering a lot from heavy traffic.

The agreement of the new road led a Danish television station to come to the town with a camera which they set up at the central square of the town. During a full day of filming the traffic the camera caught a total number of 4 trucks – one of which was bringing beer to Aporta. After this aired the need for the new road around Mariager were put into question.

The road was first reduced to a much smaller version and after a general election the road was completely scrapped. The owner of Aporta were not reelected since his party took a bad hit during the election – partly made worse by the story of the road around Mariager. To be fair the road were never meant to relieve traffic going through the city since the through traffic was already banned from driving through the town. The road should make a new way away from the harbor area – which didn’t look too plague by heavy traffic when we went through but maybe it would be during the work week.