Sommerlunden Tropical House (formerly Bornholm Butterfly Park)

Bornholm Butterfly Park (Bornholms Sommerfuglepark) was founded in 1997 on the western outskirts of Nexø, in a former nursery garden whose large glasshouse it took over. According to the English Wikipedia article, it drew more than 30,000 visitors a year.

The tropical ecosystem on show today is the result of almost thirty years' work by its former owner, a landscape gardener by trade, who designed, planted and maintained it from the first plantings to its present form.

In 2025 the park merged with Nexø Sandskulpturer, a sand-sculpture exhibition founded in 2021 in the old silos of Nexø harbour. The silos were due to be demolished as part of the harbour's redevelopment just as the butterfly park's owner wished to hand over the business. The combined site opened in 2025 as Sommerlunden; it kept the tropical glasshouse, garden and botanical side of the old park and added the sand sculptures.

The tropical house (Tropehuset) is not a showpiece building but a large horticultural glasshouse inherited from the former nursery and adapted for visitors. It covers about 1,000 m². Inside, the operators recreate the heat and humidity of a rainforest.

The space is treated as a landscape to walk through: butterflies fly freely among palm fronds, over beds of tropical plants and flowers, while fish live there too. The site also has a café set in a glasshouse (Drivhuscaféen).

The sources consulted give neither the construction date of the glasshouse nor its builder, nor details of its structure or heating. Outside, a garden laid out with ponds, waterfalls and flower beds extends the glasshouse into the open air.

The glasshouse brings together tropical plants, palms and flowers, some of which serve the butterflies' breeding. According to the English Wikipedia article, the park displayed more than a thousand butterflies of over thirty species.

The butterflies share the glasshouse with other animals from tropical habitats: exotic frogs, lizards, toads and fish, a green iguana, two species of poison dart frog and a Greek tortoise of about fifty named Sofus.

Outdoors, the garden with its ponds, waterfalls and flower beds was designed to attract Denmark's wild butterflies; the Wikipedia article also mentions quails, Japanese carp, parrots and parakeets.

Sommerlunden lies on the western edge of Nexø, on the island of Bornholm. The tropical house is part of a circuit that also includes the sand sculptures, the sandstone garden (Sandstenshaven) and a café set in a glasshouse.

The site opens daily from late May to late September, with a short reopening during the mid-October autumn holiday. The tropical house is best combined with the outdoor garden, whose ponds and flower beds draw wild butterflies; allow one to two hours for the whole site.