Hotel Bethel

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Hotel Bethel, formerly Sømandshjemmet Bethel, is a sailor’s hostel that overlooks the Nyhavn canal in central Copenhagen. Today it mainly operates as a residential hotel and it also includes a seamen’s church on the site.

In the 1870s, Pastor Daniel C. Prior and his wife began missionary work among sailors in Copenhagen. In 1876 they connected with Ninna and Andreas Wollesen, a couple who had worked with sailors in New York City and were invited to continue the work in Copenhagen. In 1879 they opened a seamen’s room in Holbergsgade, which in 1881 was replaced by an old ship named Bethel moored at the end of Nyhavn. The ship housed a church room for 300 people, plus a kitchen and a reading room.

In 1904 the Sømandsmissionen board bought the Nyhavn property at the corner of Holbergsgade and Nyhavn and commissioned architect Jens Christian Kofoed to design a new building, completed in 1905. This period also saw the idea of seamen’s reading rooms and hostels spread to other Danish ports, leading to the formation of Indenlandsk Sømandsmission on 28 March 1905. At its peak, the organization ran 75 sites in Danish ports; today only four remain in Copenhagen, Aarhus, Aalborg and Frederikshavn.

The name Bethel came from a ship that was in Nyhavn from the 1880s until it sank in 1906, which for many years gave its name to the hostel. In 1949 Bethel took over the neighboring building at Nyhavn 22, a former merchant’s house completed in 1779. Hans Christian Andersen lived there from 1871 to 1875. The yellow building is three stories high and nine bays wide. It was listed as a historic building in 1932 and restored in 1951–52 by Peter Koch and Esben Klint. A seamen’s church was opened on 23 March 1952. The church is located in a 200-year-old storage building in the yard, once used for overseas trade. The bell on the roof was donated by Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller. Services are held twice a month from October through April.