Kerstmarkt Gemeentegrot Valkenburg

Worth the trip, once. There is no other Christmas market in Europe inside a cave, and that is reason enough. Book your slot online, go on a weekday if you can, and skip the twenty-fifth: the caves are closed on Christmas Day. If you have a pram or a wheelchair, this one, the Gemeentegrot, is the easier of the two.

It is fourteen degrees in here, and it will be fourteen degrees in July. That is the first thing to know about the Gemeentegrot. You are not in a natural cave. You are standing in a quarry.

The soft yellow stone around you is marl, and people have been cutting it out of this hill for roughly two thousand years. The Romans started it. Every church and farmhouse in this valley is built from blocks that came out of corridors like this one. Over the centuries the cutting went on and on, until the hill under Valkenburg became a labyrinth of passages that nobody has ever fully mapped.

And people did more in here than cut stone. Look at the walls. Over hundreds of years they were painted and carved: saints, coats of arms, names, dates. In September 1944, when the fighting reached South Limburg, the whole town came down here. Hundreds of people lived in the Gemeentegrot for about a week while shells fell on the streets above. Across all the caves around Valkenburg, something like five thousand people were sheltering underground. When the Americans arrived they set up a field hospital in these corridors, and the soldiers scratched their own names into the marl. One of them drew a portrait of President Roosevelt. It is still here.

So when Valkenburg decided to build a Christmas market, the question was never where. The town already had the most atmospheric room in the Netherlands, dry, quiet, and always fourteen degrees. The stalls went in, the lights went up, and this became the most famous Christmas market in the country.

One thing to look for: as you walk, run your eyes along the wall at head height. Between the Christmas lights you will find the old signatures. Some of them are older than the Netherlands itself.