Long before the harbour there was the light. Building began on Hirtshals Fyr on 28 June 1860 and the lamp was first lit on 1 January 1863 — thirty-five metres of red brick faced in Dutch tile, standing on a promontory of sand and clay between Jammer Bay to the west and Tannis Bay to the east. It was not put there for the convenience of the town, which did not exist. It was put there because this headland is where ships running down the Skagerrak first meet Jutland, and a great many of them had already failed to notice. Below the lighthouse the shoreline is backed by low cliffs with a narrow, stony beach beneath. Sea fog is a regular visitor: the water stays cold, the land warms faster, and the two disagree.

On 8 September 1989 a Convair chartered from the Norwegian operator Partnair broke up in flight about eighteen kilometres north of Hirtshals and fell into the Skagerrak. Fifty passengers and five crew were aboard, and none survived. Investigators traced the cause to the tail: three of the four bolts securing the vertical fin were counterfeit parts, improperly heat-treated, carrying only around sixty per cent of the strength they were specified for. The fin worked loose and separated, and the aircraft lost control. It remains the second-deadliest aviation accident in Denmark, behind an RAF crash in 1945, and it became one of the cases that forced the industry to take seriously the question of where its spare parts actually come from.

The North Sea Museum opened in Hirtshals in 1984 with a reasonable ambition: explain the sea the town lives off. In 1998 it acquired a considerably larger one. The extension added a single tank of twenty-two by thirty-three metres holding four and a half million litres — the biggest aquarium tank in northern Europe — designed to behave like open North Sea water rather than like a display case. Two to three thousand fish circle in it: cod, saithe, turbot, sea bass, spiny dogfish, skates, the occasional ocean sunfish drifting past like a dinner plate that has taken up swimming. Renamed Nordsøen Oceanarium, it keeps around seventy species of fish in all, plus an outdoor Sealarium of 800,000 litres for harbour and grey seals. Fire destroyed the new extension in December 2003. It reopened on 22 July 2005.

Stand on the harbour front on a summer morning and the ships tied up are mostly not Danish. Hirtshals is the Danish end of the crossing to Norway, and Color Line runs services to Kristiansand and Larvik while Fjord Line sails to Kristiansand, Stavanger, Bergen and Langesund. Since autumn 2010 Smyril Line has gone the long way north, to Tórshavn in the Faroe Islands and Seyðisfjörður in Iceland. The traffic has reshaped the town's economy in a way no plan anticipated: Norwegian shoppers cross to buy Danish groceries, so the shops of a town of five thousand are stocked and staffed for a far larger population. The port has installed LNG bunkering for the ferries, and it hosts the first Danish wind farm built without subsidy.

Fishing is still the reason the place exists. The harbour was enlarged in 1966 and became one of the largest fishing ports in Denmark; the railway from Hjørring, opened in 1925, was built to move what came off the boats. Hirtshals ran its own municipality until 1 January 2007, when it was folded into an enlarged Hjørring Municipality along with Løkken-Vrå and Sindal. The town has produced a deputy prime minister — Lene Espersen, born here in 1965 — and something more useful to a small harbour's reputation: Niels Hausgaard, born in 1944, a singer, songwriter and comedian whose material and accent are both unmistakably northern Jutlandic and who has been touring Denmark with them for half a century.