Netherlands Amsterdam Tulips

About this pack

Canal cruise, Keukenhof tulips, Anne Frank house.

Inside the Netherlands Amsterdam Tulips trip

This trip opens in Amsterdam, the Netherlands' capital and largest city, with a population of 941,873 within city limits and a metropolitan area of nearly 2.5 million. Known colloquially as the "Venice of the North" for its canals, the city sits in the province of North Holland, and its historic waterways have carried that UNESCO World Heritage status since 2010. Its name comes from Amestelle, "watery area," the dam built on the Amstel river to control flooding around what was originally a small fishing village; land reclamation in the area began as early as the late tenth century, and farmers had settled along the prehistoric IJ river and its Amstel tributary as far back as three millennia ago. The city grew into a major world port during the Dutch Golden Age of the seventeenth century, when the Netherlands was among the era's dominant trading and colonial powers.

South of the city, the trip visits Keukenhof, also called the Garden of Europe, one of the world's largest flower gardens, covering 32 hectares in the municipality of Lisse and planted with about 7 million flower bulbs each year. The estate began as the kitchen garden, or keukentuin, of the fifteenth-century hunting grounds of Slot Teylingen, later passing to the Dutch East India Company captain Adriaen Maertensz Block, who built the manor house known today as Castle Keukenhof in 1641. Each autumn, some 40 gardeners plant the park's bulbs, donated by more than 100 growers, with three bulbs layered at each spot so that blooms continue in succession across the garden's roughly eight-week opening season.

Back in Amsterdam, a canal cruise takes in more than 100 kilometres of grachten, about 90 islands, and 1,500 bridges, including the three main canals dug during the seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age that form the concentric belts known as the Grachtengordel. Alongside them stand 1,550 monumental buildings, and the historic canal ring — including the Prinsengracht, Keizersgracht, Herengracht, and the Jordaan district — was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2010.

The trip's museum stop is the Van Gogh Museum, on Museum Square in Amsterdam South near the Rijksmuseum and Concertgebouw, opened on 2 June 1973 in a building designed by Gerrit Rietveld. It holds the largest collection of Van Gogh's paintings and drawings in the world, built from the works his brother Theo inherited after his death in 1890 and later preserved by Theo's widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, whose exhibitions of the paintings did much to establish Vincent van Gogh's posthumous reputation; the museum drew 2.3 million visitors in 2017, making it the most-visited museum in the Netherlands that year.

The trip closes at Zaanse Schans, a neighbourhood of Zaandam known for its collection of historic windmills and wooden houses relocated there for preservation between 1961 and 1974 from across the wider Zaanstreek region. Two of its windmills stand on their original sites and were never moved, and the Zaans Museum, established in 1994 near the site, documents the history of the buildings and industries the neighbourhood now preserves.

• Amsterdam — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Keukenhof — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Canals of Amsterdam — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Van Gogh Museum — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Zaanse Schans — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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Netherlands Amsterdam Tulips, in frame

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