Author: Love Netherlands
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The Jordaan — The Amsterdam Neighbourhood Tourists Walk Straight Past
Image: Shutterstock Most first-time visitors to Amsterdam walk right through the Jordaan without realising they’re in it. They’re looking for the Anne Frank House, or the Red Light District, or a coffee shop — and the Jordaan, which is quieter and smaller and doesn’t announce itself, slides past in a blur of crooked gables and…
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Giethoorn — The Dutch Village With No Roads
Image: Shutterstock There’s a village in the north of the Netherlands where nobody has ever driven to the shop for milk. Not because it’s remote, exactly — it’s only a two-hour drive from Amsterdam — but because Giethoorn was built on water, and most of its houses can only be reached by boat or by…
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The Quiet Art of Dutch Cheese — And Why You Should Skip the Tourist Shops
Image: Wolf-photography / Shutterstock Dutch cheese has a problem, and the problem is the tourist shops. Walk down any street in central Amsterdam and you’ll see them — bright, cheerful, windows stacked with wheels of yellow Gouda and red-waxed Edam, labelled with cute Dutch phrases and marketed aggressively at visitors. Most of what they sell…
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Why Kinderdijk Has 19 Windmills (And Why They Still Matter)
Image: Shutterstock A row of 19 windmills stands in a line along a canal south-east of Rotterdam, and together they look like the most Dutch thing on earth. Most visitors come, take a photograph, and leave thinking “well, that was lovely.” Almost nobody asks the obvious question: why are there 19 of them in a…
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A Day in Maastricht — The Dutch City That Feels Like Belgium
Image: Shutterstock Maastricht is technically in the Netherlands, but it doesn’t quite feel like it. Tucked into the far south of the country, pressed up against Belgium on one side and Germany on the other, it has more in common with Liège or Cologne than with Amsterdam. The architecture is older, the cafés more French,…
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Keukenhof in April — What to Expect from the World’s Biggest Flower Garden
Image: Shutterstock For eight weeks every year, a garden on the edge of a small Dutch town becomes the most photographed place on earth. Seven million tulips, 700 varieties, laid out across 32 hectares of formal beds and woodland paths. It’s called Keukenhof, and if you can time a Netherlands trip to see it, you…
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Rembrandt’s Leiden — Where the Dutch Golden Age Was Born
Image: Shutterstock Everyone knows that Rembrandt van Rijn was the greatest Dutch painter. Not everyone knows that before he became “Rembrandt of Amsterdam,” he was “Rembrandt of Leiden” — a miller’s son from a small university city 40 kilometres to the south, where he was born, apprenticed, and painted his first masterpieces before moving north…
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What Is a Bitterbal? A Field Guide to the Dutch Bar Snack You Need to Try
Image: Shutterstock Walk into any Dutch brown café on a weekday evening and you’ll see, on half the tables, a little dish of small brown spheres with a pot of mustard beside them. Those are bitterballen, and if you leave the Netherlands without trying them you haven’t really been. What they actually are A bitterbal…
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Delft — The Small Dutch City That Taught Vermeer How to Paint Light
Image: Shutterstock Johannes Vermeer was born in Delft in 1632 and spent almost his entire life there. He left the city only a handful of times. He painted only about 35 pictures that we know of. And yet those 35 pictures changed how we think about light, windows, domestic quietness, and the slow unfolding of…
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Why the Dutch Take Their Coffee (and Their Stroopwafels) So Seriously
Image: Shutterstock The Netherlands is not Italy, where coffee is a ritual. It is not France, where coffee is an excuse to sit down. It is, oddly, somewhere in between — and it’s almost always served with a small, unassuming, extraordinary biscuit called a stroopwafel. The coffee The Dutch drink more coffee per person than…