May 11, 2026

Zeeland Travel Guide

Zeeland’s islands and storm barriers reveal the Dutch mastery of water—and the warmth of coastal towns that survived catastrophe.

Love Netherlands

Dear Netherlands,

If you walk through Haarlem early on a weekday morning, you can still feel the rhythm of a 17th-century town that never quite left. Coffee at a canal-side café, a short cycle to the old centre, a pause at a bookshop that’s been in the same family for three generations. The Dutch don’t advertise this. They just live it.

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Photo: Neeltje-Jans-Zeeland-2020-Luka-Peternel via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In today’s email:

• Zeeland Travel Guide
• At The Café — Café ‘T Mandje — The First Lesbian Bar in Amsterdam
• Around The Web — Leiden Travel Guide, Haarlem Travel Guide, Delft — A Day in the Town That Made Vermeer + more
• From Love Netherlands — The Wadden Islands — Choosing Your Island
• Dutch Food You Will Love — Pannenkoeken — The Dutch Pancake That Eats Like a Meal

Zeeland Travel Guide

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The dyke near Ouwerkerk runs straight as a Roman road, its grass crown worn smooth by centuries of footsteps. On one side, the fields of North Brabant stretch inland. On the other, the Oosterschelde glints grey-green, and you can feel the weight of water pressing against the ancient earthwork. This is Zeeland’s ordinary miracle: a province where geography and human stubbornness have written the landscape together. Zeeland—meaning “sea-land”—sits in the Netherlands’ southwestern corner, a fragmented archipelago of islands and peninsulas that jut into the North Sea and the Rhine delta. It’s connected by the Delta Works , the engineering complex built after the catastrophic flood of 1953. To visit Zeeland is to understand, viscerally, why the Dutch have always been a people who build walls against the sea—and why they’ve learned to live, with characteristic pragmatism and even joy, on the…

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At The Café

Café ‘T Mandje — The First Lesbian Bar in Amsterdam

Café ‘T Mandje on the Zeedijk opened in 1927, run by Bet van Beeren — one of the first openly lesbian bar owners in the world. The bar’s interior is preserved exactly as Bet left it: dozens of cut-off ties pinned to the ceiling (her custom for any man who got too rowdy), framed photos of regulars from the 1930s onwards, and the same long wooden bar her customers leaned on for half a century. It’s still a working café and an active part of LGBTQ history. Stop in for a beer, take in the ceiling, and read the small museum corner near the door.

👉 Visit the café

Around The Web

From Love Netherlands

The Wadden Islands — Choosing Your Island

The ferry from Den Helder leaves at half past eight on a grey April morning, and within minutes the Dutch coastline becomes abstract—a thin line of dunes and church spires receding into mist. The North Sea is the colour of wet concrete. Gulls wheel overhead. Ahead, invisible until the last moment, one of five inhabited Dutch Wadden Islands materialises out of the haze: a low, green shape, ringed with sand. Most travellers who make it this far…

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Photo: De Waddenzee by Uberprutser via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Dutch Food You Will Love

Pannenkoeken — The Dutch Pancake That Eats Like a Meal

A Dutch pannenkoek is the size of a dinner plate, thinner than an American pancake but thicker than a French crêpe, and it’s served as a full meal — savoury or sweet, never both. The classic order is a pannenkoek met spek (with bacon) drizzled in stroop. Children get them with apple and cinnamon. The pannenkoekenhuis tradition runs in old farmhouses and converted mills across the countryside, where you can sit at long tables and order a pancake the size of your face for the price of a sandwich. It’s the Sunday family lunch you’ll wish your grandmother had known about.

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