Frederik d. V mastekran

Frederik d. V mastekran stands on Nyholm, one of the islands joined by bridges in the water between Copenhagen's Zealand and Amager. With its neighbours it forms Holmen, which served as the Royal Danish Navy's main base for more than three hundred years. King Christian IV laid out a new harbour here in the late seventeenth century. The old harbour had grown too small for the fleet.

The crane went up between 1748 and 1751, when ships kept gaining in size and weight. Its task was to lift a ship upright and lower it into the water on the jib. A prismatic tower of masonry forms the base, and large wooden beams make up the jib. The design is baroque, the work of Philip de Lange, a Dutch-Danish architect of castles, churches and military buildings. Just to the north stands his Nyholms Hovedvagt, a guardhouse with a big clock tower, finished in 1745.

Three-winged barracks by Laurits Valdemar Birkmand, built between 1908 and 1910, stand east of the guardhouse around a small square. A monument to the battle Danish and British fleets fought on 2 April 1801 stands at its centre, on a grassy circle. They say Crown Prince Frederik watched the battle from Batteriet Sixtus, a fortification at the island's northern tip. Carved figureheads from old ships turn up across the island as well. Among them are two women, one with a bouquet and one with the Danish flag, whose origins stay a mystery. A third woman, dressed in white, shades her eyes from the sun and once rode the bow of the corvette Dagmar.