Amid the tall trees of Denmark’s Rold Skov forest, sits a secret kept hidden for over 50 years.
In Northern Jutland, 30 kilometers south of Danish city Aalborg, is Regan Vest, a once top-secret nuclear bunker, built at the height of Cold War tensions.
Regan Vest was designed not as a military facility, but to house Denmark’s government and monarchy should nuclear war erupt.
Their thinking was that if Regan Vest fell, so too would Danish democracy.
The bunker was designed to house around 350 people.
Construction began in the early 60s, amid USSR nuclear tests and the Cuban Missile Crisis with the bunker becoming operational in 1969.
The Danish government never came to Regan Vest and the bunker was taken out of service in 2003, then announced to the world in 2012.
The site opened as a museum on Monday [[13 February]], after a more than $16 million dollar [[AUD]] project that included a new building and exhibition.
Visitor groups of ten go on two-kilometer, 90-minute guided tours of the facility.
Only about 60,000 tickets are made available each year, and around 65 percent of 2023's allocation has already been sold.
Curators say current tensions between Russia and the West make the experience all the more relevant and tangible to visitors.
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