NetherlandsAmsterdam, Rotterdam, Scheveningen, Markthal

Why Visit The Netherlands?

The Netherlands is a country of deceptive depth. Amsterdam's canals and the Rijksmuseum are justly famous, but the country rewards those who look beyond the capital. Rotterdam's extraordinary contemporary architecture — one of Europe's most ambitious skylines, built almost entirely after WWII — shares almost nothing visually with the medieval quietness of Utrecht or the storybook windmills of Kinderdijk. The tulip fields of the Bollenstreek in April are as overwhelming as they look in photographs. The Veluwe forest is a landscape most visitors never reach. And everywhere — on every road, in every city, through every village — the Dutch cycle. Not as a tourist activity, not as exercise, but simply as the way people move. There is also something quietly extraordinary about the ground you're standing on: around 26% of the Netherlands lies below sea level, and without one of the most sophisticated water management systems ever built, all of it would be underwater. The windmills you see aren't just decorative icons — they were, and some still are, the pumps that keep the country dry.

● Keukenhof in April — 7 million bulbs in bloom across 32 hectares, near Lisse. It's as overwhelming as it sounds. The challenge photographically is finding compositions that go beyond the obvious rows of colour — look for the transition zones where different fields meet, shoot at opening time before crowds arrive, and use the reflection pools for mirror images. Buy tickets online well in advance; the park sells out.

● Amsterdam's canals in autumn — the combination of reflected canal houses, fallen leaves on the water, and the characteristic soft Dutch light makes October the finest month to photograph the city. The Jordaan neighbourhood at dawn, before the tourist boats begin, is the quietest and most atmospheric. The Rozenhoedkaai view looking toward the Westerkerk tower at dusk is one of Amsterdam's iconic compositions.

● Rotterdam's architecture — one of Europe's most striking cities for contemporary architecture photography. The Erasmus Bridge at blue hour, the Markthal interior's painted ceiling from below, and the Cube Houses from the street below all offer completely different photographic challenges within 15 minutes' walk of each other.

● Kinderdijk at sunrise — nineteen windmills in a row reflected in the polder water, with mist still on the fields. Arrive before 8am in spring or summer and you often have the place almost to yourself. By 10am the tour groups arrive. The light on the windmill sails as the sun comes up is worth the early start.

● The Hoge Veluwe & Veluwe forest — the largest national park in the Netherlands, covering heathland, forest, and shifting sand dunes in Gelderland. The park provides free white bicycles at the entrance — one of the best ways to move through a forest landscape I have found anywhere. Wildlife is abundant: red deer, wild boar, and the extraordinary Kröller-Müller Museum sits in the middle of the trees, housing one of the world's finest Van Gogh collections.

The Netherlands Has Around 1,200 Surviving Windmills. Here Are the Best.

The windmill is not a decorative symbol of the Netherlands — it is a functional engineering response to a fundamental problem. Much of the country lies below sea level, and without a continuous system of drainage, the polders would flood within weeks. The windmills were the original pumping mechanism, their rotating sails driving Archimedes screws that lifted water from one level to the next, moving it outward to the sea. Today electric pumping stations do most of the work, but over 1,200 windmills survive, and roughly 600 are still operational.

● Kinderdijk — 19 windmills in two rows along the polder canals, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, easily reached by waterbus from Rotterdam (35 min) or Dordrecht. The most photogenic windmill landscape in the country, especially at dawn. Every Saturday in July and August, all 19 windmills are put in operation simultaneously — a remarkable sight.

● Zaanse Schans — an open-air windmill village 20 minutes north of Amsterdam, where 15 historic windmills were relocated and preserved. Each windmill had a specific industrial function: De Kat grinds paint pigments (the only remaining paint-grinding windmill in the world), De Zoeker produces oil, Het Jonge Schaap is a working sawmill. The complex also includes a cheese farm, clog workshop, and traditional Dutch houses. More curated than Kinderdijk, but fascinating for understanding what windmills actually did.

● Schiedam — home to the tallest windmills in the world, built to feed the Dutch genever (gin) industry. De Noord stands 33.3 metres — higher than a 10-storey building — and was used to grind grain for distilleries. At one point Schiedam had nearly 20 of these giants; five survive today. Far less visited than Kinderdijk or Zaanse Schans, and all the better for it.

● De Schermer polder — 11 windmills in a working polder landscape in North Holland, most still operational, with almost no tourist infrastructure. This is where you find windmills as working countryside rather than heritage attraction. Cycle through on a quiet morning and you will have them almost entirely to yourself.

● National Windmill Day — held every second weekend in May, when hundreds of normally closed windmills across the country open their doors. One of the finest days in the Dutch calendar for visitors — and the best single opportunity to go inside working windmills that are otherwise inaccessible.

Around 26% of the Netherlands lies below sea level, with the lowest point reaching 6.7 metres below the waterline. A further 29% of the country sits at or near sea level and would flood in a severe storm without protection. In total, some 59% of the Netherlands is vulnerable to flooding — including Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Delft. This is not a hypothetical: in February 1953, a North Sea storm surge breached the dikes of Zeeland and the southwestern islands, flooding an area the size of a large city and killing 1,836 people in a single night.

The Dutch response to that disaster was the Delta Works — a programme of dams, sluices, locks, and storm surge barriers built across the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt delta between 1954 and 1997. The Oosterscheldekering, completed in 1986, is a 9-kilometre moveable barrier with 62 massive steel gates, each the height of a six-storey building. When a severe storm is forecast, the gates close within an hour. It is listed as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World — and when you stand on it in person, the scale is genuinely staggering.

The windmills came first. From the 13th century onward, the Dutch understood that the only way to create and maintain agricultural land in a delta was to pump it continuously dry. The polder system — a ring dike enclosing an area, with windmills pumping the interior water out — is one of the great feats of pre-industrial engineering. Flevoland, the most recently created Dutch province, was entirely reclaimed from the sea between 1955 and 1968 using modern electric pumps. It is now home to 400,000 people, on land that 70 years ago was the bottom of the Zuiderzee. The Oostvaardersplassen nature reserve — one of the finest bird-watching sites in Europe — was originally planned as an industrial area on this reclaimed land, but nature moved in before the factories did, and the Dutch had the wisdom to let it stay.

Today the Netherlands exports its water management expertise globally — Dutch engineers and water boards advise on flood protection systems from New Orleans to Jakarta. The country is considered the world leader in climate adaptation, delta management, and sustainable water infrastructure. Visiting the Delta Works, Kinderdijk, or even simply walking through a polder landscape, you are moving through one of humanity's great long-term engineering projects.

Oostvaardersplassen (Nieuw Land National Park) — one of Europe's most important and unusual nature reserves, located in Flevoland between Lelystad and Almere — land that was reclaimed from the sea in 1968 and was supposed to become an industrial zone. Nature colonised it before the factories arrived, and the Dutch authorities had the remarkable good sense to let it be. The result is 56 km² of marshland, reed beds, and wet grassland that now hosts tens of thousands of migratory and resident birds, as well as free-roaming Konik horses, Heck cattle, and red deer. Over 300 bird species have been recorded here, including White-tailed Eagles (their first Dutch comeback), Eurasian Spoonbills, Bearded Tits, Bluethroats, and spectacular gatherings of geese and waders in winter. The visitor centre near Lelystad offers walking routes, wildlife safaris by eco-cart, and telescope viewing areas across the reed beds. It feels nothing like the Netherlands most visitors see, and everything like a genuinely wild place.

De Zoom–Kalmthoutse Heide — a cross-border nature park shared between the Netherlands and Belgium, protecting a rare heathland landscape straddling Noord-Brabant province and the Belgian Antwerp region. The Dutch section (De Zoom) and the Belgian section (Kalmthoutse Heide) together form one of the largest remaining heathland reserves in the Low Countries — purple in August when the heather flowers, and extraordinary for woodland birds year-round, including Black-necked Grebe, Woodlark, and Nightjar. A remarkable place to visit from either side of the border, and almost entirely unknown to international visitors.

There Are More Bicycles Than People Here. Join Them.

The Netherlands has more bicycles than people — approximately 23 million bikes for 17 million inhabitants. The cycling infrastructure is the finest in the world: dedicated cycle lanes on almost every road, cycle-priority junctions, bicycle traffic lights, secure parking at every station, and a culture in which cycling is simply what people do, regardless of age, weather, or distance. Nobody wears lycra. Nobody uses a helmet (though you might want to). People cycle in work clothes, with shopping, with children on the back, in the rain. The Dutch relationship with the bicycle is not sporty — it is civilisational.

Accommodation options for cycling tours — the Dutch cycling infrastructure extends to accommodation. B&Bs and small hotels designated fietsvriendelijk (cyclist-friendly) offer secure bike storage, drying rooms, and early breakfasts. Designated cycle-touring campsites allow tent-only pitches (no caravans) and are spaced roughly a day's ride apart along the major routes. For a more comfortable touring option, self-guided cycling holiday companies like Dutch Bike Tours operate luggage-transfer tours where your bags travel ahead to the next hotel while you ride with just a daypack — one of the most stress-free ways to explore the country by bike. Glamping and forest lodge options (see the Veluwe section above) make excellent overnight stops on multi-day routes through central Netherlands.

The node network (knooppunten) — the Dutch cycle junction network uses numbered nodes (knooppunten) at intersections throughout the country. You plan your route by stringing node numbers together, following the signs from one number to the next. It requires no maps, no apps, and no navigation skills — you simply write down a sequence of numbers before you leave and follow the signs. It is so elegantly simple that it has been adopted by Belgium and is now spreading across Europe. Pick up a free node-network map at any tourist office or bike hire shop.

Is Dutch Food Good? Yes — But Not in the Way You Expect.

Let's be honest: the Netherlands is not France. Dutch cuisine does not have the international reputation of its southern neighbours, and traditional Dutch cooking is deliberately simple — designed for a cold, practical, maritime culture where food was fuel first and pleasure second. But that is only part of the story. The other part involves 350 years of colonial trade, a vast Indonesian empire, and the most interesting food legacy in Northern Europe. Once you understand that, eating in the Netherlands becomes genuinely exciting.

Traditional Dutch food — what it actually is

Dutch cooking is rooted in the polder and the sea: potatoes, vegetables, smoked fish, dairy, and bread. The flagship dish is stamppot — mashed potato combined with one or more vegetables (kale, sauerkraut, endive, or carrot and onion) and topped with a smoked rookworst sausage. It sounds humble, but done well on a Dutch winter evening it is deeply satisfying. Erwtensoep — split pea soup — is by tradition so thick that a spoon should stand upright in it, and it genuinely often does. These are not dishes that photograph beautifully, but they are honest, filling, and very Dutch.

For street food, the Netherlands is excellent. Fresh haring (raw herring), eaten the traditional way — head tilted back, fish held by the tail — from a market stall or haringkar (herring cart) is one of the great Dutch eating rituals. The fish is silky, cold, and mildly briny. Order it met uitjes (with raw onions). Bitterballen — deep-fried crispy balls of meaty ragout, served burning-hot with mustard — are the essential Dutch bar snack, available everywhere and dangerously easy to overeat. A stroopwafel fresh from a market stall is a genuinely exceptional thin waffle sandwich with warm caramel syrup — place it over a hot coffee cup for 30 seconds before eating, as the Dutch do. Poffertjes — tiny, fluffy buckwheat pancakes in a heap with butter and icing sugar — are a market institution.

Dutch cheese deserves its own paragraph. The Netherlands is the world's largest cheese exporter, but the difference between a supermarket Gouda and an aged artisan boerenkaas (farmhouse cheese) bought at a market is profound. Aged Gouda (18+ months) is crystalline, caramel-intense, and complex. The weekly cheese markets in Gouda, Alkmaar, and Edam are genuine spectacles — cheese porters in white uniforms carrying rounds on wooden sledges, the weighing ritual unchanged for centuries. Buy the old cheese, not the young one wrapped in red wax.

Two more things worth knowing: FEBO — the Dutch automat wall of heated snack windows found on city streets — is a uniquely Dutch institution where you feed coins into a slot, lift a small window, and retrieve a hot kroket or frikandel. It is not fine dining. It is perfect at midnight. And drop — Dutch liquorice — is the national confectionery obsession. The Dutch consume more liquorice per capita than any other nation, and Dutch drop is nothing like the sweet version found elsewhere: it ranges from mildly salty to intensely, almost medicinally salty-bitter. Try it once. Many visitors are bewildered. Some become addicted.

The Indonesian legacy — and why the best meal in the Netherlands might be rijsttafel

The most distinctive thing about eating in the Netherlands is the Indonesian connection. The Dutch colonial presence in the Indonesian archipelago lasted from the 17th century until 1949, and the culinary exchange runs deep. Indonesian food is not immigrant restaurant culture here — it is fully woven into mainstream Dutch daily life, eaten by everyone, at all ages, as ordinary weeknight food.

The pinnacle of this is the rijsttafel (literally "rice table") — an elaborate feast of 12 to 20+ small Indonesian dishes served alongside rice. The dishes span the archipelago: beef rendang slow-cooked in coconut and spice, satay with peanut sauce, gado-gado (vegetable salad with peanut dressing), sambal goreng, sweet-sharp acar pickles, prawn crackers, and much more. It is generous, aromatic, and genuinely one of the most pleasurable ways to eat in Europe — and it costs a fraction of what a comparable experience costs in a French or Italian restaurant. For authentic rijsttafel in Amsterdam, Restaurant Blauw (Amstelveenseweg) and Indrapura (near Rembrandtplein) are consistently excellent. In Utrecht, Restaurant Blauw has a second location equally good.

Beyond rijsttafel, nasi goreng (fried rice) and bami goreng (fried noodles) are so embedded in Dutch life that many Dutch people consider them comfort food on a par with stamppot. Surinamese roti shops — another colonial legacy — serve remarkable flatbread with curried chicken and potatoes for a few euros. If you see a Surinamese roti shop, go in.

The honest verdict — Dutch food is not the main reason people visit the Netherlands, but it is better and more interesting than its reputation suggests. The street food is excellent and cheap. The cheese is world-class if you buy the aged kind. The Indonesian food is genuinely outstanding. And the rijsttafel is an experience worth planning an entire evening around.