Oct 08, 2026
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Visit Dutch Heritage Sites Canada
Trace your family story across Canada’s thriving Dutch communities, then plan your journey home to the Netherlands.
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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 via Love Netherlands
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In today’s email:
- Discover Your Dutch-Canadian Roots: A Heritage Guide for Dutch Canadians
- At The Café — Café Chris — The Oldest Brown Café in the Jordaan
- Around The Web — Rotterdam Netherlands: Complete Guide to Things to Do and See, Dutch Healthcare for American Retirees: Everything You Need to Know (2026), The Dutch-American Homecoming: From New York to Old Holland + more
- From Love Netherlands — Zaanse Schans Day Trip from Amsterdam: Complete Guide 2026
- Dutch Food You Will Love — Raw Herring — The Dutch Test
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Discover Your Dutch-Canadian Roots: A Heritage Guide for Dutch Canadians
👉 Read the full story
Your oma packed a single suitcase. Your opa said goodbye to the farm he grew up on. They stepped off a ship in Halifax and started again from nothing. More than a million Canadians today carry that story in their family line. Dutch Canadians form one of the largest immigrant communities in Canadian history. Between 1947 and 1960, roughly 160,000 Dutch people made the journey across the Atlantic. They came to farm the prairies, work the valleys of British Columbia, and build communities in Ontario. Many brought their church, their language, and their love of solid craftsmanship with them. Now their grandchildren and great-grandchildren want to make the journey back. This guide shows you how to trace your Dutch ancestry , find the records that hold your family’s story, and plan a meaningful trip to the Netherlands. The Dutch-Canadian Story The first significant Dutch arrivals in Canada…
👉 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 Chris — The Oldest Brown Café in the Jordaan
Café Chris on the Bloemstraat opened in 1624 — making it, depending on whom you ask, the oldest continuously operating bar in Amsterdam. The bell-pull next to the urinal is still wired to the bar, so the bartender knows when to flush. The walls hold framed Ajax memorabilia from the 1970s, and the regulars are mostly Jordaan locals who have been coming since their fathers brought them in for the first jenever. It’s small, it’s loud on Saturday nights, and it’s one of the most authentic brown cafés left in the city.
👉 Visit the café
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Around The Web
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From Love Netherlands
Just 20 kilometres north of Amsterdam, the wooden windmills of Zaanse Schans rise above the flat Dutch landscape in one of the most iconic scenes in the Netherlands. This Zaanse Schans day trip takes around 17 minutes by train from Amsterdam Centraal, making it one of the easiest and most rewarding half-days you can spend outside the capital. Step inside a working windmill, watch craftspeople carve wooden clogs, or wander the riverside path…
👉 Read the full story
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Photo: Shutterstock
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Dutch Food You Will Love
Raw Herring — The Dutch Test
Every spring, a Dutch ritual unfolds on the streets of Amsterdam, The Hague, and Scheveningen. Herring stalls put out the year’s first catch — the Hollandse nieuwe — and locals queue to eat it raw, tipped back by the tail, sometimes on a soft white roll with onions. It tastes of the sea and of brine and, if you’re lucky, of nothing at all in the best possible way. Foreigners tend to grimace the first time. The Dutch laugh gently. “Three bites,” they say. “Then you love it forever.” They are usually right.
👉 Read the full story
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