The Netherlands: A Country
Argued Out of the Sea

All Destinations › Europe › Netherlands

Rembrandt and Van Gogh within a few hundred metres of each other, nineteen working windmills that hold back the water, and seven million bulbs in flower for eight weeks a year.

A third of the Netherlands sits below sea level, and the country is still there because of eight hundred years of extremely stubborn engineering. Kinderdijk is where that story is most visible: nineteen windmills built around 1740 to drain a polder, still standing where they were put and still lived in by millers and their families. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it is also a working machine.

The Golden Age that funded all of it is preserved in Amsterdam’s canal ring, itself UNESCO-listed, and in the Rijksmuseum, where Rembrandt’s Night Watch hangs at the end of the Gallery of Honour. A few hundred metres away the Van Gogh Museum holds over 200 paintings, 500 drawings and 700 letters — a life rather than a collection.

At Finders & Keepers Safaris we take travellers well beyond Amsterdam: to Giethoorn, a village of canals and thatched farmhouses with almost no roads, explored by silent electric boat; to Rotterdam, rebuilt after 1940 into the most architecturally adventurous city in the country; and, in season, to the Keukenhof, where seven million bulbs flower across 32 hectares for eight weeks and then stop.