Nordic noir filming locations: the real places behind the stories

From the streets of Copenhagen to the fjords of Iceland, these are the Nordic locations behind the books, films and series that have captivated audiences worldwide. Some you will already know. Others are worth discovering.

There is a particular satisfaction in standing somewhere you have only ever seen through a screen or on a page. The café where the detective broods. The bridge where the body was found. The fishing village sealed off by a blizzard. These places feel known before you arrive, and yet they are always more than you expected.

Nordic fiction has produced some of the most geographically specific storytelling of the past 3 or so decades. The settings in these works are not interchangeable backdrops. They are Lappeenranta near the Russian border, or Siglufjörður at the end of a mountain tunnel, or Södermalm on a winter morning with frost on the cobblestones. Writers and filmmakers return to them precisely because place does something that character and plot alone cannot.

This guide is for readers and viewers who want to go further, literally. Each section describes a destination through the works set there and what you will find when you arrive.

Stockholm, Sweden

The Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson

Novels: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest (2005–2007)

Films: Swedish trilogy (2009), Hollywood remake dir. David Fincher (2011)

If a single work can be said to have introduced the English-speaking world to Nordic crime fiction, it's this one. Stieg Larsson’s trilogy, published posthumously from 2005, sold more than 60 million copies worldwide and generated an industry of adaptations, imitations, and walking tours. The journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the hacker Lisbeth Salander have become two of the most recognisable characters in contemporary fiction.

Almost everything in the books happens in Stockholm, and most of it on the island of Södermalm. Blomkvist’s apartment building at Bellmansgatan 1 is still there, with its extraordinary view over central Stockholm. The street-level entrance to the Millennium magazine offices, above a former Greenpeace office on Götgatan, is still there. The 7-Eleven where Lisbeth buys frozen pizza is still there. Even the café where Larsson himself used to write, now trading under a different name, still serves coffee on Hornsgatan.

Stockholm City Museum runs an official Millennium walking tour of Södermalm, taking visitors to the key locations from both the novels and the films. It is one of the most thoroughly documented literary trails in Europe, and Södermalm itself, with its mix of independent shops, elevated views and unhurried pace, is among Stockholm’s most rewarding neighbourhoods to explore on foot.

Where to go: Södermalm, Stockholm. Most locations are within easy walking distance of Slussen metro station, and exploring the Millennium trail, on foot and at your own pace, is easily incorporated into a Stockholm stopover or broader Swedish or Scandinavian itinerary with 50 Degrees North.

Malmö and Copenhagen

The Bridge (Bron/Broen) — Hans Rosenfeldt

TV series, 4 seasons, 2011–2018. Available on streaming platforms including Amazon Prime Video.

The Øresund Bridge connects the Swedish city of Malmö to the Danish capital Copenhagen. It opened in 2000 and takes about 20 minutes to cross by train. In 2011, it became the setting for one of the most acclaimed crime series in Nordic television history, when a body was found at its exact midpoint, requiring both Swedish and Danish police to share jurisdiction.

The Bridge is not, at its core, a show about the bridge. It is about the gap between two countries that share a language family, a history, and a stretch of water, and yet remain quite distinct from one another. Swedish detective Saga Norén and her various Danish counterparts enact that difference with every scene. But the bridge itself, crossing between two cities and two countries, gives the show its architectural logic.

Most of the filming took place in Malmö, with Copenhagen featuring mainly in the first season. Malmö’s Västra Hamnen district, with its waterfront, the Turning Torso skyscraper, and the harbour views, appears throughout the series. The bridge is visible from various points in both cities, and crossing it by train from Copenhagen Airport to Malmö central station remains one of the more pleasingly cinematic commutes in Europe.

Where to go: The Malmö waterfront, Västra Hamnen, and the Øresund Bridge itself. The train journey across the bridge from Copenhagen Airport (Kastrup) to Malmö Central takes around 20 minutes.

Copenhagen, Denmark

Copenhagen appears in more Nordic crime fiction than any other city, which is not surprising. It is the region’s most internationally recognisable capital, and Danish television in particular has produced a remarkable run of internationally successful crime and political drama. Three works stand out for their specific, visitable connection to the city.

The Killing (Forbrydelsen) — Søren Sveistrup

TV series, 3 seasons, 2007–2012. Available on various streaming platforms.

The Killing arrived on BBC Four in the spring of 2011 and became the series that persuaded a generation of English-speaking viewers that subtitled television was worth the effort. Detective Sarah Lund, in her Faroese knitwear, became one of the most-discussed fictional characters of the decade. The series is set across 20 consecutive days, one episode per day, following the murder of a young woman named Nanna Birk Larsen and the political fallout that radiates from it.

The filming took place in authentic Copenhagen locations throughout: the police headquarters at Poligården, the grey suburban streets south of the city, Amager Forest, and Christiansborg Palace, which dominates the second season as the seat of Danish political power. Christiansborg is open to visitors and remains one of the most atmospheric buildings in Copenhagen. You can stand in the great hall where so much of the show’s political drama plays out.

The Chestnut Man — Søren Sveistrup

Novel (2018) and Netflix series (2021-)

Created by the same writer as The Killing, The Chestnut Man is a tighter, more contained thriller that follows two Copenhagen detectives investigating a series of ritualistic murders. The killer leaves small figures made from chestnuts at each crime scene. It has the same quality of atmospheric Copenhagen photography as the earlier series, and the same instinct for grounding its violence in specific social contexts.

The Netflix series was well received internationally and is a natural entry point for viewers who find three seasons of The Killing a larger commitment than they are ready for.

Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow — Peter Høeg

Novel (1992)

Film: Smilla’s Sense of Snow, dir. Bille August (1997) | TV series (2025, Danish-German production)

Published in Danish in 1992 and translated into English in 1993, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow spent 26 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and is widely credited with introducing American readers to Nordic crime fiction, more than a decade before Stieg Larsson. The protagonist, Smilla Jaspersen, is half-Danish, half-Greenlandic Inuit, and the novel is as much about the colonial relationship between Denmark and Greenland as it is about a murder mystery.
The story begins in Christianshavn, Copenhagen’s canalside district, where Smilla lives in a housing complex. The opening scenes, in which she investigates a young boy’s death from a snowy rooftop, are rooted in a very specific corner of the city. The book then moves to Greenland, which we address in its own section below.

A new six-episode TV adaptation premiered in 2025, set in a futuristic version of Copenhagen, which departs significantly from the original material. For visitors wanting to trace the novel’s Copenhagen, Christianshavn, with its canals, coloured warehouses, and quieter pace, remains exactly as evocative as Høeg describes it.

Where to go: Christiansborg Palace (Prins Jørgens Gård, open to visitors), Christianshavn (canal walks, the district where Smilla lives), and Copenhagen’s police headquarters at Poligården. All are accessible by metro or on foot from the city centre.
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Ystad, Sweden

Wallander — Henning Mankell

Novel series, 12 books (1991–2013)

Swedish TV adaptations (multiple series, 1994–2016)

BBC English-language series starring Kenneth Branagh (2008–2016)

Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander is arguably the character who made the lonely, middle-aged Scandinavian detective a recognisable international archetype. The books, set in the small coastal town of Ystad in Sweden’s southernmost province of Skåne, began in 1991 and ran for 12 novels. They gave rise to multiple Swedish TV adaptations and a BBC English-language series starring Kenneth Branagh, filmed on location in Ystad despite its British production and cast.

Ystad itself is a well-preserved medieval town with a population of around 30,000, sitting on the Baltic coast 56 kilometres south-east of Malmö. It is compact, handsome, and entirely recognisable from the series. The police station exterior (actually a swimming pool building repurposed for filming), the main square, the harbour, and the surrounding flat farmland of Österlen all appear throughout both the Swedish and British adaptations. Ystad Studios, which produced many of the adaptations, offers visitor experiences connected to the Wallander world.

Where to go: Ystad, Skåne, southern Sweden. The town is reachable by train from Malmö in around an hour. Ystad Studios offers Wallander-related visitor information.

Oslo, Norway

Harry Hole series — Jo Nesbø / Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole (Netflix, 2026)

Novel series, 12 books (1997 onwards)

Netflix series: Detective Hole, released March 2026

Jo Nesbø is Norway’s most internationally successful crime writer, with more than 60 million books sold worldwide. His Harry Hole series follows a brilliant, self-destructive Oslo detective through twelve novels, each one anchored in a specific corner of the city. Oslo in these books is not the clean, prosperous capital that most visitors encounter. It is a city of contrasts: quiet residential streets alongside darker currents, elegant parks with complicated histories.

A Netflix adaptation of the fifth novel, The Devil’s Star, was released in March 2026 under the title Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole, with Tobias Santelmann as Hole and Joel Kinnaman as his corrupt adversary. It was filmed in more than 160 locations across Oslo over 113 days, including many of the specific sites that appear in the novels. Harry’s regular haunt, Restaurant Schrøder in St. Hanshaugen, which dates from 1925, appears in the series exactly as it does in the books.
Vigeland Sculpture Park in Frogner, one of Nesbø’s stated favourite places in Oslo, also features prominently. The Frognerbadet open-air swimming pool, the Royal Palace Park, and residential streets around Bislett all appear throughout.

The series holds a 91% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and will draw significant new attention to Oslo as a literary destination. The 12 novels are widely available in English translation and make excellent reading before or during an Oslo visit.

Where to go: Restaurant Schrøder, Vigeland Sculpture Park (Frogner), Frognerbadet. Oslo is a compact, walkable city and most Harry Hole locations are reachable on foot or by tram. Exploring them is easily incorporated into a Norway itinerary with 50 Degrees North.

Lappeenranta, Finland

Bordertown (Sorjonen) — Miikko Oikkonen / J.M. Ilves

TV series, 3 seasons (2016–2020), plus film Bordertown: The Mural Murders (2021). Available on Netflix.

Novel series, 4 books by J.M. Ilves (2016–2019).

Bordertown was among the first Finnish series to reach an international audience via Netflix, and it set a template for Finnish crime drama that has since been built on by several other productions. It follows Detective Inspector Kari Sorjonen, a savant-like investigator who relocates his family from Helsinki to Lappeenranta, a city on Finland’s southeastern border with Russia, hoping for a quieter life. The proximity to Russia is not incidental. It shapes the cases, the politics, and the atmosphere of unease that runs through all three seasons.

The series was followed by a four-book companion series, written under the pen name J.M. Ilves (the pseudonym of two Finnish authors), which expanded on the same character and setting. The books are based on the television series rather than the other way around, making them a natural continuation for viewers who want more time in Sorjonen’s world.

Lappeenranta is a real city of around 70,000 people, best known for its lakeside setting on Saimaa, Finland’s largest lake. The sand castle festival held there each summer draws international visitors in its own right. The Russian border is physically present, roughly 30 kilometres to the east, and that liminal quality, a place that belongs clearly to Finland yet faces something else, is exactly what the show communicates.

Where to go: Lappeenranta, southeastern Finland, on Lake Saimaa. Reachable by train from Helsinki in around two hours.

Helsinki, Finland

Deadwind (Karppi) — Rike Jokela

TV series, 3 seasons (2018–2021). Available on Netflix.

Deadwind was one of the first Finnish crime series to gain significant international streaming distribution, alongside Bordertown, and it introduced a different kind of Finnish city to international viewers. Where Bordertown uses Lappeenranta’s border-town atmosphere, Deadwind uses Helsinki’s industrial edges and harbour districts, the parts of the city that tourists rarely reach but that give the capital its actual texture.

The series follows detective Sofia Karppi, recently widowed, raising two children, and returning to work in Helsinki’s homicide department. Her first case connects a murder to a controversial construction project, and subsequent seasons pull her through conspiracies that reach into the city’s political and business structures. The show was filmed across Helsinki and the surrounding Uusimaa region, using real city locations throughout.

Helsinki itself is one of the most architecturally distinctive capitals in the region, with its neoclassical Senate Square, its archipelago access, and its distinct Finnish design aesthetic. It is also compact and easily explored on foot or by tram.

Where to go: Helsinki city centre and harbour district. Senate Square, the Market Hall, and the South Harbour are all within easy walking distance of each other, and the show’s grittier industrial locations are accessible by tram.

Reykjavík, Iceland

Inspector Erlendur series — Arnaldur Indriðason

Novel series, 14 books from 1997 (10+ translated into English)

Film: Jar City, dir. Baltasar Kormákur (2006)

Arnaldur Indriðason is one of the most decorated crime writers in the Nordic tradition. His Detective Erlendur series has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide in over 40 languages, and won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger in 2005. Erlendur is a solitary, contemplative figure, haunted by a childhood loss and drawn compulsively to Iceland’s missing persons cases. He lives and works almost entirely within Reykjavík, and the city he inhabits is quite different from the one on the tourist trail.

Indriðason’s Reykjavík is socially complex, historically layered, and sometimes genuinely dark. The novels are rooted in Iceland’s genetic database controversies, its legacy of domestic violence, its relationship with the American military presence at Keflavik, and the particular psychological weight of living in a small society where everyone is connected and few things stay secret. Reading them before visiting Reykjavík gives the city a depth it does not always reveal to the casual visitor.

The 2006 film adaptation of the third novel, Jar City, starring Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson (who later appeared in Trapped), is available on streaming and makes an excellent companion to the books.

Valhalla Murders — Thordur Palsson

Icelandic TV series, 1 season (2019). Available on Netflix.

The second major Icelandic crime series to reach international streaming after Trapped, the Valhalla Murders is a tighter, shorter work set in and around Reykjavík. A Norwegian detective returns to his Icelandic homeland to help investigate a series of murders connected to a youth care institution. The series uses the capital’s streets, harbour, and surrounding landscape throughout. Less widely known than Trapped but consistently well reviewed.

Where to go: Reykjavík is Iceland’s capital and the arrival point for almost all international flights. The city is compact and walkable. The National Theatre, the old harbour, Hallgrímskirkja church, and the surrounding residential streets all feature across Indriðason’s novels.

Siglufjörður, North Iceland

Siglufjörður is a fishing town of just over a thousand people, set in a narrow fjord on Iceland’s north coast, about 80 kilometres north of Akureyri. Until tunnels were bored through the surrounding mountains in the 2000s, it was almost completely isolated in winter. It is one of the most visually striking small towns in Iceland, surrounded by steep peaks and backed by the Greenland Sea. It also happens to be the setting for two significant and distinct works of Nordic crime fiction.

Trapped (Ófærð) — Baltasar Kormákur

Icelandic TV series, 3 seasons (2015–2022). Available on Amazon Prime Video.

Trapped premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015 and went on to air on BBC Four in the UK and SBS in Australia, becoming the first Icelandic crime series to reach a genuinely international audience. A body is found in the harbour of a remote Icelandic fishing village. A blizzard closes the only road in or out. The murderer is somewhere among the residents and a shipload of stranded passengers, and the local police chief, Andri Ólafsson, must find them before the storm breaks.

The series was filmed primarily in Siglufjörður, and during production the cast and crew were themselves trapped in the town several times by severe weather. That authenticity is visible on screen. The fjord, the harbour, the single road vanishing into a mountain tunnel, the herring factory, the swimming pool, the houses packed together against the mountain wall: all of it is real and all of it is still there.

Dark Iceland series — Ragnar Jónasson

Novel series, 6 books (English editions 2015–2020). Widely available in English translation.

Ragnar Jónasson grew up visiting Siglufjörður, where his grandfather lived, and the town is the setting for all six novels in his Dark Iceland series. Detective Ari Thór Arason arrives in Siglufjörður on his first posting, far from his girlfriend in Reykjavík, and finds himself drawn into a series of mysteries that the town’s tight-knit community would rather keep buried.
Jónasson has described his approach as combining the atmospheric isolation of classic Agatha Christie closed-circle mysteries with the Nordic noir tradition. The first novel, Snowblind, reached number one on the Amazon Kindle charts in both the UK and Australia on publication. Rights to the series have been sold in more than 16 countries.

Readers of the Dark Iceland novels who then watch Trapped, or viewers of Trapped who then pick up the books, will find themselves in the same physical place with a very different emotional guide. The town is small enough that the same streets, the same harbour, and the same mountain backdrop appear in both works. It is one of the most unusually specific literary-travel convergences in the Nordic region.

Where to go: Siglufjörður is reached via the Héðinsfjörður tunnels from Ólafsfjörður, or from Akureyri to the south. The Herring Era Museum (Síldarminjasfan) is one of the finest small museums in Iceland and gives essential context for the town’s history. There is a ski resort nearby for winter visitors. A visit to Siglufjörður, including time at the museum and the key locations from both the series and the novels, is easily incorporated into a tailor-made Iceland itinerary with 50 Degrees North.

The Westfjords, Iceland

Hildur series — Satu Rämö

Novel series, 5 books in Finnish (2022–2025); English translations from 2024 (Bonnier Zaffre)

TV adaptation premiered 2026, Finnish-Icelandic co-production

Satu Rämö is a Finnish author who moved to Iceland twenty years ago and settled in Ísafjörður, a small town in the Westfjords. Her Hildur series, which she calls “Nordic blue” rather than Nordic noir, follows Hildur Rúnarsdóttir, the sole detective in a remote Westfjords police station, and her Finnish colleague Jakob Johanson. Five books have been published in Finnish, with English translations appearing from 2024. The first, translated as The Clues in the Fjord, won the 2025 Petrona Award for the best Scandinavian crime novel of the year. A Finnish-Icelandic TV adaptation premiered in early 2026.

The Westfjords are Iceland’s least-visited region. The peninsula is enormous, its coastline deeply indented with fjords, its interior largely roadless. Ísafjörður, where the series is set and where Rämö lives, is the largest settlement, a town of around 2,500 people at the end of a long fjord road. The landscape in the books is not decorative. It is structural. The fjords create the isolation that makes the crimes possible, and the ocean creates the sensory backdrop against which the characters’ interior lives unfold.

The Westfjords are best reached by domestic flight from Reykjavík to Ísafjörður, or by a long drive across some of Iceland’s most remote terrain. They reward travellers who are prepared to slow down, and they are genuinely unlike anywhere else in Iceland.

Where to go: Ísafjörður, Westfjords, Iceland. Reachable by domestic flight from Reykjavík (around 40 minutes) or by road. The drive from Reykjavík takes approximately six to seven hours depending on route and conditions.

Vík, South Iceland

Katla — Baltasar Kormákur and Sigurjón Kjartansson

Icelandic TV series, 1 season, 8 episodes (Netflix, 2021). Created by the same team behind Trapped.

Katla is a different kind of Icelandic story. Where Trapped is a crime drama rooted in community and isolation, Katla is closer to folklore and myth, a slow, atmospheric series about grief, identity, and the things that resurface when the ground beneath you shifts. One year after the Katla volcano begins erupting, most of the inhabitants of the small coastal town of Vík have evacuated. Those who remain start encountering figures emerging from the ash covered glacier, people who disappeared or died, returned as younger versions of themselves with full memories intact.

The series was the first Icelandic drama produced entirely for Netflix, and holds (at the time of writing) a 100% critics’ approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It was filmed on location in Vík during the COVID-19 pandemic, which meant the town was quieter and more isolated than usual, adding an unintended layer of authenticity to the already stark setting. Creator Baltasar Kormákur, who also made Trapped, describes the two series as very different in tone, but they share the same conviction that place is not background: it is the condition that makes the story possible.

Vík í Mýrdal sits directly south of the Katla volcano, which lies beneath Mýrdalsjökull glacier. The volcano is real, active, and widely considered overdue for a significant eruption. The town’s church, perched on a hill above the main street, has been designated the official emergency shelter in the event of a catastrophic eruption, and that detail is woven into the series. Reynisfjara, the black sand beach just west of the town, with its hexagonal basalt columns and the Reynisdrangar sea stacks rising from the surf, appears throughout the series and is one of the most visually distinct landscapes in Iceland.

The Katla Ice Cave, formed within the glacier by geothermal activity, is accessible via guided tour and provides the most direct connection between the series and something a visitor can actually experience. Standing inside it, beneath the blue ice of a glacier that sits above an active volcano, the show’s premise stops feeling like science fiction.

Where to go: Vík is on the Ring Road, approximately two and a half hours by road from Reykjavík. Reynisfjara black sand beach is five minutes from the town centre. The Katla Ice Cave is accessible via guided glacier tours departing from the Mýrdalsjökull glacier area. A stop in Vík, including time at Reynisfjara and a guided glacier and ice cave experience, fits naturally into any south Iceland itinerary with 50 Degrees North.

Greenland

Greenland appears in Nordic fiction less frequently than Iceland or the Scandinavian capitals, but when it does, it tends to carry weight. The territory’s relationship with Denmark, its size, its sparse population, its landscapes of ice and tundra, and its geopolitical position all make it a setting that resists reduction to atmosphere alone. Two works in particular have given English-speaking readers and viewers a sustained sense of the place.

Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow — Peter Høeg

Novel (1992). See also the Copenhagen section above.

After its Copenhagen opening, the novel moves to Greenland for its climax. The Greenland it describes is a place of extraordinary physical beauty and deep political ambiguity: a territory that is neither fully Danish nor yet independent, whose Inuit population carries the weight of a complicated colonial history. Høeg wrote with genuine knowledge of that history, and the novel’s engagement with Greenlandic identity remains its most durable quality, three decades on.
The novel’s Greenland is remote and fictionalised, but its emotional geography is real. Readers who travel to Greenland after the book tend to find it exactly as strange and as beautiful as they expected.

Borgen: Power & Glory — Adam Price

TV series, Season 4 of Borgen (8 episodes, Netflix, 2022).

The first three seasons of Borgen (2010–2013) are one of the finest political dramas in the history of television, following the rise and compromises of Denmark’s first female prime minister. They are set entirely in Copenhagen and are well worth watching on their own terms. Season four, Power & Glory, is a different kind of story. Birgitte Nyborg, now Foreign Minister, must navigate the consequences of an oil discovery in Greenland, which threatens Denmark’s climate commitments, ignites an independence movement, and draws in the United States, China, and Russia.

What distinguishes this season from most fictional treatments of Greenland is that it was actually filmed there. All exterior scenes were shot in Greenland, primarily in and around Ilulissat, with only interior scenes produced on sets in Denmark. Greenlandic actors and filmmakers were involved in the production throughout, and the script was substantially revised after the production team spent time on the ground and realised, in the director’s own words, how little they had known.

Ilulissat is one of the most accessible entry points to Greenland for international visitors. It is the country’s third-largest town and the gateway to the Ilulissat Icefjord, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where icebergs calved from the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier drift slowly into Disko Bay. The scale of the landscape is exactly what the series conveys.

Where to go: Ilulissat, western Greenland. Reachable by Air Greenland from Copenhagen (around four and a half hours) or from Reykjavík. The Ilulissat Icefjord and the surrounding iceberg landscape are among the most remarkable natural environments on earth.

Planning your journey

Most of the destinations in this guide are part of 50 Degrees North’s existing portfolio of Nordic journeys. Some require more deliberate planning and are best approached as tailor-made itineraries built around your specific interests and timeline. Others, like Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Reykjavík, slot naturally into existing routes.

If a book or series has put a particular place on your list, that is an excellent starting point. We design journeys around exactly that kind of specific curiosity, and we have been to these places, in most cases many times. The locations described in these works are real. The experiences available in them are genuine. And the gap between watching a scene and standing in it is smaller than you might think.

Get in touch with the 50 Degrees North team to begin planning your journey to the Nordic region.