Royal Christmas Fair Den Haag

Look up at the trees. The chalets of this fair stand under rows of lime trees, and those rows exist because of an emperor.

In the Middle Ages the Lange Voorhout was lined with farms. Then the Counts of Holland settled their government in The Hague, and from the fourteenth century nobles, court officials and senior magistrates built houses here. In 1536 the Emperor Charles the Fifth visited, and ordered the separate front gardens joined into one broad avenue, planted with four rows of lime trees. Almost five hundred years later, that is still the shape of the place you are standing in.

In 1597 Prince Maurice wanted a canal dug down the middle, like so many Dutch streets. It never happened, most likely because the Voorhout sits on a high bank of sand. So instead of water, you get space, and that is why a fair fits here at all.

In the Golden Age the very rich built palaces along it. The street was largely rebuilt in the eighteenth century, which is the elegant facade you see now. Number 74 was a royal palace and is now the Escher Museum. The Kloosterkerk at the end began as a fourteenth-century friary church and spent a period after the Reformation as a cannon foundry.

One more tradition to look for: every December a Christmas tree from Sweden is lit on the Voorhout, in front of the Escher Museum, with a Lucia choir singing. Lucia, on the thirteenth of December, is Sweden's festival of light in the darkest weeks of the year.