Mols Bjerge translates literally as the Mols Mountains, which requires a certain generosity. The high point is 137 metres. But the name is not really a joke. This is broken country in a nation famous for being flat, and from the viewpoint at Trehøje, with the land falling away to inlets and coves, you understand why Danes drive here. The landscape is the work of the last ice age: moraine dumped and shoved into ridges, then drowned at the edges as the sea rose, leaving the crumpled coastline of southern Djursland. The hills themselves cover 2,500 hectares near the middle of a park that runs to 180 square kilometres, bounded by the Kattegat to the east and the Kalø woodlands to the west. Environment Minister Troels Lund Poulsen announced the park on 17 January 2008, and Queen Margrethe II inaugurated it on 29 August 2009 as Denmark's second national park. The town of Ebeltoft, along with villages and summer-house districts, lies inside it — this is a lived-in landscape, not a wilderness.

King Erik Menved raised Kalø Castle in 1313, one of four strongholds thrown up across Jutland to break a rebellion of nobles and peasants against the Crown. Forced labour built them, and the people made to build them understood the point. The clay for its bricks came from the coastal cliffs at Hestehave Wood across the water. It did not last long as royal policy: by 1320 the next king was under enough pressure from the nobility to pull it down. What remained decayed further through the Swedish occupation of 1643 to 1645, and in 1662 Ulrik Frederik Gyldenløve demolished the ruin outright and shipped the stone to Copenhagen to build Charlottenborg. Restoration began in 1903. Nearby, the hunting lodge of Jagtslottet, designed by Hack Kampmann in 1898, was a summer retreat for the German Jenisch family until German-owned property in Denmark was confiscated after the Second World War; the national park secretariat works out of it today.

The claim sounds like tourist-board arithmetic until you look at the habitat list: heath, oak woodland, pasture, bog, meadow, salt marsh, coastal heath, beach meadow, cliff and sea, all packed into one small peninsula. More than half of all wild Danish plant species grow here — pasque flower, catchfly, cudweed — along with a great many rare and threatened fungi, some found nowhere else in the country. Centuries of farming shaped nearly all of it, and only fragments of the original woodland survive. Skovbjerg is one — an acidophilous stand of pedunculate oak, poor in vascular plants but rich in epiphytic lichens, with roe deer at about twenty per square kilometre and cattle now grazing fifteen hectares of it. Tolløkke Wood, just south of Ebeltoft, is the last patch of old forest on the whole Ebeltoft peninsula: wood anemone, early dog-violet and lesser celandine on the floor, ivy up the trunks, great spotted woodpeckers in the cavities. Adders and viviparous lizards work the open ground. One local curiosity is a wolf spider, Pardosa danica, known to science from a single specimen collected in Mols Bjerge in 1883 and never found again.

On the eastern coast, Jernhatten — the Iron Hat — drops forty-nine metres to the Kattegat. The rock is hard enough that the waves have not managed to cut it back, which is exactly why the headland is still standing while the softer coast around it has retreated. You reach it on foot from the car park through a beechwood called Troldeskoven, the Troll Forest. From the top the view runs across open water to the small island of Hjelm. Below the surface lies the Blak, a cold-water stony reef carrying an extensive kelp forest — good snorkelling in the summer months, and a rare chance in Denmark to swim over something that looks like a submerged wood. The path continues north to the hills of Hyllested Bjerge, through Bagskoven, and down onto the beach.

People have been marking these hills for a very long time. Stabelhøje, the Stack Hills, is a well-preserved Bronze Age burial site on high ground. In Hestehave Wood stands Store Stenhøj, a Stone Age long barrow of the Funnelbeaker culture, in woods good for birdwatching. Later generations left their own layers: the water mill at Ørnbjerg, and the early eighteenth-century manor of Kalø Gods, now state-owned and housing schools and an environmental administration. In the middle of the park sits the old farm of Strandkær, split between Nedre Strandkær, built around 1730 and now a research base and training centre for nature guides, and Øvre Strandkær, which holds the visitor centre. A trekking path leaves from there through pinewood and deciduous forest, out across old pastures where cattle still graze — much the same management that made this landscape in the first place.