Watch: Fire engulfs Copenhagen’s old stock exchange in ‘Notre-Dame moment’

A major fire broke out at Copenhagen’s old stock exchange on Tuesday morning, collapsing the twirled spire that was once an integral part of the Danish capital’s skyline.

Jakob Vedsted Andersen, a fire service spokesman, said: “The extinguishing work is very difficult.”

He added that there are parts of the building that the firefighters cannot enter because it is too dangerous.

The smoke is visible from as far away as the Swedish city of Malmo, across the Oresund Strait made famous by the crime series The Bridge.

There were no immediate reports of injuries, police said, after blocking off parts of the city centre as part of the firefighting efforts.

Video from the scene showed people including Brian Mikkelsen, the head of the Chamber of Commerce, carrying away large paintings from the building to save the artefacts.

The 17th-century Børsen is one of the city’s oldest buildings, located a stone’s throw from the Danish Folketing Parliament and Christiansborg Royal Palace. It had been under renovation when the fire broke out.

Its destruction, falling on its 400th anniversary, has been compared to the fire that ravaged Paris’s Notre-Dame cathedral five years ago.

Troels Lund Poulsen, the Danish defence minister, wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “Horrible pictures from the Bourse. So sad. An iconic building that means a lot to all of us ... Our own Notre-Dame moment.”

The 184ft spire featured four dragons, with crowns representing the ties between Denmark and its close neighbours Sweden and Norway.

Onlookers gasped as it collapsed onto the streets below.

Klavs Lockwood, a local resident who helped to rescue national artefacts from the fire, said: “I saw the tower topple over. It fell like a tree being felled. It was violent.

“This is Notre-Dame in Denmark. For us, this is just as big a disaster.”

The Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris was severely damaged in a fire while being renovated five years ago.

When the fire broke out on Tuesday morning, several carpenters were still working on the roof and had to be rescued.

The scaffolding around the building made it harder for emergency services to reach the flames, while the copper roof preserved the heat, the Copenhagen fire department said.

Jens Kastvig, a fire safety expert, said that workers often covered fire alarms during dusty work to prevent false alarms.

A blaze was still raging inside the building on Tuesday morning and there was reportedly a loud bang, with the Danish broadsheet Berlingske reporting that a section must have collapsed.

The Dutch Renaissance-style building no longer houses the stock exchange, but serves as headquarters for the Danish Chamber of Commerce. It hosts a collection of paintings of important Danes dating from the 17th Century.

One of the paintings rescued was Peder Severin Kroyer’s From Copenhagen Stock Exchange, a monumental 1895 oil-on-canvas group portrait that depicts 50 of the most powerful traders at the time.

The Chamber of Commerce wrote on X: “We are met by a terrible sight. The Bourse is on fire.”

“We are currently working on saving everything that can be saved,” Morten Langager, the Børsen director, said in a post to X.

Jakob Engel-Schmidt, the Danish culture minister, said it was “touching” that passers-by were helping emergency workers “save art treasures and iconic images from the burning building”.

He added: “400 years of Danish cultural heritage in flames.”

Denmark’s newly crowned monarch King Frederik said that “an important part of our architectural cultural heritage was and continues to be in flames” in a message on Instagram.

Leif Hansen, the architect behind the restoration, told local media that “this shouldn’t have happened. It is the 400th anniversary of this fantastic building, which has never burned down. I can hardly stand it.’”