For centuries, the Swedish city of Malmö (in Danish, Malmø), 20km
distant from Copenhagen across the Øresund, and the surrounding province
of Skåne were part of a Danish empire with its capital in Copenhagen.
With the Swedish capture of Skåne in the seventeenth century, however,
Malmö was reduced from the second city of a major northern European
power to a neglected outpost of a greater Sweden in which power rested
firmly with distant Stockholm. The sense of rejection persists - Malmö's
residents derisively call people from Stockholm null åttas , "zero-eights",
after the telephone code for Stockholm.
In July 2000, Malmö's historical ties with the Danish capital were
renewed with the opening of the Øresund Bridge - Scandinavia's biggest-ever
engineering project. The "bridge" (actually a road and rail link made up
of a four-kilometre tunnel, a four-kilometre artificial island and an
eight-kilometre cable bridge) has brought the two cities within a thirty-minute
train ride of one another, effectively transforming Malmö into a
satellite-cum-suburb of Copenhagen, placing the Danish capital at the
heart of a new region, the so-called Øresund , which now looks set to
dominate the western Baltic for the foreseable future.
Trains run roughly every 15-20min from Copenhagen's Central Station to
Malmö (65kr each way), via Kastrup airport, with fast onward connections
from Malmö to Stockholm, Gothenburg and Oslo (reservations always
required). A single journey across the bridge by car costs 230kr. The
Copenhagen Card is not valid for the crossing but can be used to get
reductions at some museums in Malmö. For more information, contact the
tourist office at Malmö Central Station (tel 46 40/30 01 50,
www.tourismmalmoe.com ).
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