Friesland’s Eleven Cities: 200km of Medieval Towns the Rest of the Netherlands Forgot

An introduction to the route

The Elfstedentocht is a 200-kilometre skating tour that links eleven medieval cities in the province of Friesland, beginning and ending in the provincial capital, Leeuwarden. It was first organised in 1909 by a Frisian lawyer named Mindert Hepkema, who collected the records of skaters who had completed the loop on their own and proposed making it a single competition. Since then it has been held only fifteen times. The most recent edition was on 4 January 1997, when around 16,000 skaters started the route — and roughly 15,000 finished within the cut-off — on a single day of natural ice. The required conditions — at least fifteen centimetres of black ice continuously around the entire 200 kilometres of canals, lakes and rivers — have not occurred since. Each winter the Koninklijke Vereniging De Friesche Elf Steden meets, the country waits, and the verdict is the same: not this year.

To understand why a skating race that has not been held in nearly thirty years still occupies so much space in the Dutch imagination, it helps to know that the Elfstedentocht is not really a sporting event. It is the rare moment when the country drops everything and watches Friesland — a province most Randstad city-dwellers visit perhaps twice in a lifetime — become the centre of national attention. Schools close. Businesses send staff home. The route, which passes through farms, polders and small towns most of the country has never heard of, becomes the only thing on television. When the conditions fail, which is almost every year now, the disappointment is national, not local.

Friesland is the only Dutch province with its own official language. West Frisian, or Frysk, has been recognised by the Dutch state since 1956 and is spoken as a first language by roughly 350,000 of the province’s 650,000 residents. Road signs are bilingual. The provincial parliament conducts business in either language. Children in Frisian schools study Frysk alongside Dutch and English from primary school onwards. Frysk is closer to Old English than it is to Dutch, which is why the Frisian phrase “bûter, brea en griene tsiis” (butter, bread and green cheese) is occasionally cited as the closest living relative of pre-Norman English. The province treats this linguistic separateness as a quiet point of pride rather than a campaign.

The route itself is shaped roughly like a flattened diamond, with Leeuwarden at the top, Sneek and the lake district in the south-west, the IJsselmeer coast running up the western edge, and Dokkum at the eastern point before returning to Leeuwarden. Most of it follows canals built between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries to connect the eleven Hanseatic and trading towns. When the canals do not freeze, which is now most years, the route is cycled, walked or driven. The official long-distance cycle route LF20, also called the Elfstedenroute, follows the loop almost exactly, and most of it can be done on dedicated bike paths separated from traffic. We have walked sections of it in late autumn and cycled the full loop over five days in early summer, and the experience is the same: a part of the Netherlands that operates at a different speed and does not particularly mind whether the rest of the country notices.

In this email

• Leeuwarden — the capital, with its leaning tower and the museum that holds Mata Hari’s belongings
• Sneek — the seventeenth-century Waterpoort and the country’s largest sailing week
• IJlst — the smallest cities and the last working sawmill of its kind
• Sloten — a star-shaped fortress town of 700 people inside its original walls
• Stavoren — the oldest Frisian city and the bronze statue that explains its decline
• Hindeloopen — painted furniture, wooden bridges and the first Frisian skating museum
• Workum — the Jopie Huisman Museum and the long brick churches of the IJsselmeer coast
• Bolsward — the Renaissance city hall and the home of the first published Frisian poet
• Harlingen — the working harbour, the ferries to the Wadden islands, and Noorderhaven
• Franeker — the oldest still-working planetarium in the world, built in a living room in 1781
• Dokkum — the place Saint Boniface was killed in 754, and the two windmills on its star-shaped walls

Best time to visit: Late April to early October. The IJsselmeer wind softens after April and the polder light is at its longest in June. September is quieter and the canals are warm enough for swimming.

Travel logistics: Leeuwarden is two and a quarter hours from Amsterdam Centraal by direct Intercity. From there, the loop can be cycled in four to six days, driven in two with overnight stops, or sampled by combining trains (to Sneek, Workum, Stavoren, Harlingen and Franeker) with bikes hired locally.