A Polish-Colombian couple, Magdalena Kujawińska and Heinner Valenzuela, travelled to Copenhagen to marry, circumventing complex bureaucracy at home in Poland.
Living in Krakow, the couple had been engaged for over three years but faced significant hurdles.
“We realised that it’s not that easy to get married in Poland,” the 30-year-old Ms Kujawińska said, citing the requirement for a certificate proving they were not already married.
A certificate, needed from Colombia, presented an insurmountable challenge due to its three-month validity.
“We tried to get it from Colombia, but it’s only valid for three months, and it couldn’t get to Poland from Colombia in three months. It was just impossible for us,” she added.
Learning about Denmark’s relaxed marriage laws from a colleague, Ms Kujawińska and her fiancé engaged an online wedding planner. The process proved remarkably swift, with approval granted in just four days.
“And in four days, we had the decision that the marriage could be done here,” a smiling Ms Kujawińska recounted as they awaited their 10-minute ceremony at Copenhagen’s 19th-century City Hall.
Couples who don’t live in Denmark, both mixed- and same-sex, are increasingly getting married in the Scandinavian country — prompting some to dub Copenhagen the “Las Vegas of Europe.”
The head of the marriage office at Copenhagen City Hall, Anita Okkels Birk Thomsen, said that about 8,000 wedding ceremonies were performed there last year. Of those, some 5,400 of them were for couples in which neither partner was a Danish resident.
“That’s almost double what we saw five years ago,” she said. “They come from all over the world.”
But the city sees a downside to that: demand for ceremonies at City Hall now far exceeds the number of slots available.
Mia Nyegaard, the Copenhagen official in charge of culture and leisure, said in a statement to The Associated Press that the “significant rise” in the number of foreign couples getting married in the capital “poses challenges for Copenhagen-based couples wishing to get married.”
Local authorities plan to take action. Nyegaard said about 40 percent of wedding slots available at City Hall will be reserved for Copenhagen residents starting from the end of October.
While booking a slot there is the most obvious way to get married in the city, arranging a ceremony with a private registrar is also an option, and that won’t be affected.
