Sep 13, 2026
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Discover Your Dutch Roots
Follow seven days of archives, ancestral towns, and Golden Age history across the Netherlands.
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Love Netherlands
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Dear Netherlands,
Every Dutch village has a bell tower, a market square, a brown café, and a bakery older than the country it sits in. The magic of the Netherlands isn’t Amsterdam. It’s the 400 other places that don’t need to try. Places like Thorn, where every house is painted white. Places like Giethoorn, where nobody has ever driven to the shop.
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Kinderdijk at sunrise — one of the Netherlands most iconic heritage landscapes. Photo:…
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In today’s email:
- 7-Day Dutch Heritage Itinerary: Trace Your Roots Across the Netherlands
- At The Café — Café Hoppe — The Brown Café at the Centre of Amsterdam
- Around The Web — Best Day Trips from Amsterdam: 12 Unmissable Destinations (2026), Dutch-Australian Heritage Trip: How to Plan Your Homecoming to the Netherlands, DAFT Netherlands: How Americans Can Live in the Netherlands (2026 Guide) + more
- From Love Netherlands — The Love Netherlands Guide № 004: Dutch Jenever
- Dutch Food You Will Love — Boerenkaas — The Farmhouse Cheese With a Protected Name
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7-Day Dutch Heritage Itinerary: Trace Your Roots Across the Netherlands
👉 Read the full story
You have a Dutch surname. Your grandparents spoke Dutch at home. Or perhaps you simply feel an inexplicable pull towards the Netherlands — its flat horizons, its amber-lit canal houses, its centuries-deep sense of place. Whatever drew you here, this seven-day Dutch heritage journey will take you beyond the tourist trail and into the very heart of where your ancestors lived, loved, worked, and left their mark on the world. This itinerary is built for the Dutch diaspora traveller: someone who wants to stand in an archive and hold a baptism record from 1742, walk the streets their great-grandmother walked, and eat stamppot in a café that has been open since the Golden Age. It weaves together ancestry research, historic towns, and the quiet pleasures of Dutch life into a journey that will stay with you long after you come home. Before You Go: Essential Preparation A heritage trip rewards…
👉 Read the full story
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 Hoppe — The Brown Café at the Centre of Amsterdam
Café Hoppe on the Spui has been pouring beer since 1670 — long enough that the wooden floor has sunk slightly at the door from three and a half centuries of footfall. It’s the kind of place where the bartender knows the regulars’ orders, the tourists get treated exactly the same as the locals, and the bitterballen come out exactly hot enough to burn the roof of your mouth if you don’t wait. It sits right in the middle of the city, a few minutes’ walk from the Dam, and it’s one of the last genuinely authentic brown cafés you can still find without trying. Come in the late afternoon, sit outside on the pavement, and order a beer.
👉 Visit the café
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Around The Web
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From Love Netherlands
Ask for “jenever” in an old Dutch bar and the bartender will often fill a tulip-shaped glass to the very brim, set it on the counter, and wait for you to bend down and take the first sip without lifting it — the traditional way to avoid spilling a drop. This juniper-scented grain spirit is the ancestor of English gin, and for centuries it was distilled in such volume around the town of Schiedam that the place earned the nickname “Black Nazareth”…
👉 Read the full story
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Photo by Adam Wilson on Unsplash
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Dutch Food You Will Love
Boerenkaas — The Farmhouse Cheese With a Protected Name
Boerenkaas is the protected designation for cheese made on a Dutch farm with raw milk from that farm’s own cows, by the farmer themselves, with no industrial shortcuts. It tastes nothing like the supermarket Gouda. Younger wheels are creamy and sweet; aged ones develop deep crystalline cracks and a flavour that lingers for minutes. Every Friday, in Alkmaar’s old Waagplein cheese market, you’ll see boerenkaas being weighed on antique scales — a pageant for tourists and a real trade for cheesemakers. Pair it with apple, walnut and a glass of jenever.
👉 Read the full story
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