Amsterdam is one of the greatest small and most romantic cities in Europe.
The Netherlands is a densely populated country in part reclaimed from the sea with about half of its land lying below sea level. Many tourists only come to the Netherlands to visit Amsterdam. But Holland has plenty to offer outside its capital. Crisscrossed with canals, the flat landscape is perfect for cycling with historic town centers, classic windmills and other tourist spots sprinkled across the country. In the west and north the long coastline is marked by mile upon mile of protective dunes and sandy beaches. During springtime the flower gardens become great tourist attractions in the Netherlands providing a bold spectacle of vivid colors.
Although almost half of it was once under water, the Netherlands is one of the most urbanized – and densely populated – nations on earth, with a huge range of places to visit packed into a relatively small area. Its fertile, pancake-flat landscape is gridded with drainage ditches and canals, beneath huge open skies, while the country’s towns and villages are often pristine and unchanged places of gabled townhouses, pretty canals and church spires.
Despite the country’s diminutive dimensions, each town is often a profoundly separate place with its own distinct identity – indeed there’s perhaps nowhere else in the world where you can hear so many different accents, even dialects, in such a small area. In spring and summer the bulbfields provide bold splashes of colour, and in the west and north the long coastline is marked by mile upon mile of protective dune, backing onto wide stretches of perfect sandy beach.
In the west of the country, beyond Amsterdam, the provinces of Noord- and Zuid-Holland are for the most part unrelentingly flat, reflecting centuries of careful reclamation work as the Dutch have slowly pushed back the sea. These provinces are predominantly urban, especially Zuid-Holland, which is home to a grouping of towns known collectively as the Randstad (literally “rim town”), an urban sprawl that holds all the country’s largest cities and the majority of its population.
