Jul 30, 2026
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Kinderdijk’s Windmills Decoded
Your essential 2026 guide to the Netherlands’ most mesmerising UNESCO site.
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Love Netherlands
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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: Shutterstock
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In today’s email:
- Kinderdijk: The Complete Guide to the Netherlands’ Most Iconic Windmills (2026)
- At The Café — Café Papeneiland — The Café on the Corner Bill Clinton Loved
- Around The Web — Tracing Your Family in Utrecht: A Heritage Travel Plan, Gouda Day Trip from Amsterdam or Rotterdam: The Complete Guide (2026), Tracing Your Family in Overijssel: A Heritage Travel Plan + more
- From Love Netherlands — Tracing Your Family in Groningen: A Heritage Travel Plan
- Dutch Food You Will Love — Kroket — The Older, Stranger Cousin of Bitterballen
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Kinderdijk: The Complete Guide to the Netherlands’ Most Iconic Windmills (2026)
👉 Read the full story
Nineteen windmills rise from the flat Dutch polder at Kinderdijk, their sails turning slowly above a mirror-still canal. Built around 1740 to drain the surrounding land, they operated for nearly three centuries. Today, this UNESCO World Heritage Site draws visitors from across the world, and it earns every superlative: this is the largest concentration of ancient windmills in the Netherlands, and one of the most photogenic landscapes in Europe. Here is everything you need to know before you visit. Love the Netherlands? Join our free newsletter for hidden Dutch gems → inlovewithnetherlands.com/subscribe What makes Kinderdijk special? The Netherlands has roughly 1,200 surviving windmills, but nowhere else in the country do they gather in such dramatic numbers. At Kinderdijk, 19 mills stand in two parallel rows along a polder canal in the Alblasserwaard, south-east of Rotterdam. The name…
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Have you been there? Do you have a memory of this corner of the Netherlands? Hit reply and tell us — we’d love to hear your story.
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At The Café
Café Papeneiland — The Café on the Corner Bill Clinton Loved
Café Papeneiland sits at the corner of the Prinsengracht and the Brouwersgracht, in a 17th-century building so charmingly crooked that the Delft tiles inside lean slightly to one side. It’s been a café since 1642. Bill Clinton stopped in once, ate a slice of apple pie, and the café has never quite let it go — there’s a small framed photo behind the bar. The apple pie really is the order: thick, warm, just enough cinnamon, served with whipped cream that doesn’t come from a can. Sit by the window upstairs and watch the canal boats turn the corner below.
👉 Visit the café
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Around The Web
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From Love Netherlands
Your great-grandparents left Groningen a long time ago. They packed what they could, said goodbye to the flat fields and wide skies, and sailed away to South Africa, America, or Australia. Now it is your turn to go back. This guide will help you trace your Dutch family roots in Groningen — and plan a trip that means something. Why Groningen Matters for Dutch Heritage Research Groningen is the northernmost province of the Netherlands. It sits at…
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Photo via Love Netherlands
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Dutch Food You Will Love
Kroket — The Older, Stranger Cousin of Bitterballen
A kroket is a finger-shaped roll of crumbed and deep-fried beef ragout — the same filling as bitterballen, but in a single satisfying portion the size of a thick chip. You eat it slid into a soft white roll with a smear of mustard, called a broodje kroket, and it’s the Dutch lunch counter’s defining order. The most famous come from automat-style FEBO walls in Amsterdam, where you slot a few coins in and pull a hot kroket out of a glass-fronted cabinet. There’s no shame in it — half the city has eaten one before a tram home.
👉 Read the full story
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