Solvang: A Danish Village in the California Sun

A few miles south of Los Olivos sits one of the most improbable towns in California, a corner of Denmark under the Santa Barbara sun. Solvang, whose name means sunny field in Danish, was founded in nineteen eleven by a group of Danish Americans who wanted to build a colony far from the brutal winters of the Midwest. Three men, Benedict Nordentoft, Jens Gregersen, and Peter Hornsyld, met in San Francisco, formed the Danish American Corporation, and purchased about nine thousand acres of the old Rancho San Carlos de Jonata surrounding Mission Santa Ines.

This was part of a great wave of migration, for between the eighteen sixties and the First World War roughly three hundred thousand Danes had crossed to the United States. The settlers opened a school that first year and in nineteen fourteen founded Atterdag College, a folk school named for a medieval Danish king, teaching young people in both Danish and English with singing, gymnastics, and folk dancing. For its first decades Solvang looked like an ordinary farm town.

Then, beginning in nineteen forty-seven, residents deliberately rebuilt in half-timbered Danish style, adding windmills, storks, and steep gabled roofs. Today the town draws well over a million visitors a year for its bakeries, its aebleskiver, and its cheerfully invented Old World charm.