Hoorn & Enkhuizen: The Golden Ports the Zuiderzee Left Behind

Two Westfrisian harbour towns that once ruled global trade and have been quietly extraordinary ever since

An introduction to Hoorn and Enkhuizen

There is a moment on the train from Amsterdam towards the old Zuiderzee coast when the city loosens its grip and the landscape opens into something older and more improbable. The polder fields are immense here, lying below sea level between long straight dykes, and the horizon is so flat and so far away that the sky doubles in size. Farmhouses sit at road level behind their embankments. Wind turbines turn slowly in the middle distance. Then, after forty minutes, the train pulls into Hoorn, and ahead of you, just visible through the station arch, is a seventeenth-century harbour tower reflected in still green water.

Hoorn and Enkhuizen are two of the most consequential small towns in Dutch history, and among the least visited by travellers who have not yet found them. At their peak in the 1600s, they were among the wealthiest ports in the world: Hoorn contributed forty ships to the fleet that defeated the Spanish Armada, named Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America, and produced Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the ferociously effective founder of Batavia who built the Dutch East Indies empire. Enkhuizen was the largest herring port in Europe, sent ships to every corner of the globe, and built a town hall that would not embarrass a capital city. Between them they held seats on the governing board of the VOC — the Dutch East India Company — that shaped the modern world.

The Zuiderzee that made them great also undid them. The construction of the Afsluitdijk in 1932, closing the inland sea into the freshwater IJsselmeer, brought an end to centuries of tidal commerce. But because decline came gently rather than catastrophically — the fishing moved, the trade moved, but the buildings stayed — both towns retained their seventeenth-century street plans almost entirely intact. Walk from Hoorn’s Rode Steen square to the Binnenhaven harbour, or from Enkhuizen’s train station through the Drommedaris gate tower to the old Buitenhaven, and the experience is of a city at the height of its powers, preserved under glass.

Neither town is widely known outside the Netherlands. They sit on a rail line that most visitors never take, forty and sixty minutes respectively from Amsterdam Centraal. This is, in every sense, the guide for the traveller who wants to see what the Golden Age actually looked like when it was being lived in, rather than being looked at through a museum glass.

Best time to visit: May through September for the harbour markets and outdoor cafés; June and July for the longest evenings over the IJsselmeer. October is spectacular in the low autumn light.

Travel logistics: Direct train from Amsterdam Centraal to Hoorn (40 min, twice hourly); continuing to Enkhuizen (25 min further, hourly). No car required — both towns are entirely walkable. A single day return ticket covers both.

In this email

This week’s Premium guide covers both towns in depth. What’s inside:

• Hoorn: the Rode Steen, the Westfries Museum, the VOC harbour, and the streets behind the waterfront
• Jan Pieterszoon Coen and the uncomfortable history behind the beautiful buildings
• The Zuiderzeemuseum in Enkhuizen: the finest open-air museum in the Netherlands
• Enkhuizen’s harbour, the Drommedaris tower, and the town’s surviving fish-smoking houses
• A two-day itinerary covering both towns with the right sequence and the right pace
• Where to eat, where to drink, and where to stay on the old Zuiderzee coast