Aug 09, 2026
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Nijmegen’s Two Thousand Year Story
Why the Netherlands’ oldest city deserves your next weekend break.
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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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Michielverbeek via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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In today’s email:
- Nijmegen: Two Thousand Years on the Waal
- At The Café — Café ‘T Mandje — The First Lesbian Bar in Amsterdam
- Around The Web — Best Time to Visit the Netherlands: A Month-by-Month Guide (2026), Discover Your North Holland Roots: Heritage, Diaspora, and Family History, Rotterdam Food Guide: Where to Eat, Drink and Explore the Market Scene (2026) + more
- From Love Netherlands — Discover Your Friesland Roots: Heritage, Diaspora, and Family History
- Dutch Food You Will Love — Kibbeling — The Dutch Fried Cod From the Fish Stall
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Nijmegen: Two Thousand Years on the Waal
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Nijmegen: Two Thousand Years on the Waal The Netherlands’ oldest city rewards the curious traveller with Roman ruins, a bold new river island, and the world’s greatest walking festival. An introduction to Nijmegen Most visitors to the Netherlands head straight for Amsterdam, then Rotterdam, then perhaps Delft or Haarlem. Nijmegen, tucked into a great bend of the River Waal in the east of the country, tends to slip past on the itinerary — which is precisely why it remains such an extraordinary discovery. This is the oldest city in the Netherlands, a place where Romans built a legionary fortress on a bluff above the river some two thousand years ago, where Charlemagne held court and Frederick Barbarossa rebuilt a royal chapel, and where the river itself has recently been given back its freedom, carving a shining new channel and leaving a wild island park in its wake. Nijmegen sits on the…
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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 ‘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
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Around The Web
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From Love Netherlands
Stand in the quiet churchyard of a terp village in Friesland — a mound of earth that farmers built by hand over centuries to keep the sea at bay — and you feel the weight of an extraordinary story. The families who lived here did not simply inhabit this land. They shaped it, defended it, and carried its memory with them when they left. If your surname traces back to this province, you carry a piece of that story too. Friesland is unlike any…
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Photo via Love Netherlands
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Dutch Food You Will Love
Kibbeling — The Dutch Fried Cod From the Fish Stall
Kibbeling is bite-sized chunks of cod, dipped in spiced beer batter and deep-fried until the outside crackles and the fish inside flakes apart. Every fish stall in every Dutch town square sells it, served in a paper cone with a small pot of garlic-and-mustard whitlofsaus. There’s nothing quite like the first bite on a cold afternoon, salt and crisp and steam all in one go. Dutch fried fish is taken seriously here — every region has its own batter recipe, and the truly local stalls cook to order rather than pre-frying.
👉 Read the full story
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