🎧 Audio stories

Somewhere above your head, through the rock, are the ruins of Valkenburg castle. That is not a coincidence. The passages you are walking through were cut to build it.

From around the year 1050, people quarried the soft yellow marl out of this hill, block by block, and carried it up to raise the castle walls. The tunnels kept growing for eight centuries. Together they run for about five kilometres. Local stories say the knights used them as secret escape routes, slipping out of the castle unseen and coming up behind an attacking army.

Mining stopped around 1886, and the passages were forgotten. But they had already been a hiding place more than once. In 1797, during the French occupation, Napoleon's government closed the churches and exiled priests who refused to swear loyalty to France. A priest called Father Widdershoven built a secret chapel deep in these tunnels and kept saying Mass here.

The passages were rediscovered in 1937, just in time. During the Second World War the cave sheltered Jewish people, local families and, later, American soldiers. Look at the walls as you go: some of those soldiers carved their names into the marl.

It is about twelve degrees in here, all year round, and very damp. That is why this market feels the way it does. You are not under a tent. You are inside a quarry that has kept people safe for a thousand years.

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.

You are walking through the oldest city in the province of South Holland. In 1220 Count William the First gave Dordrecht its city rights, and for the next few centuries it was one of the richest places in the Low Countries.

The reason is the water around you. Dordrecht sits where great rivers meet: the Oude Maas, the Merwede, the Dordtsche Kil. In 1299 the city won the staple right, which meant that wine, wood and grain shipped along these rivers had to stop here and be offered for sale first. Merchants had no choice. Dordrecht got rich.

The great tower you can see is the Grote Kerk, built between 1285 and 1470. It is sixty-five metres tall and its carillon has sixty-seven bells.

The water also brought disaster. On the night of the eighteenth of November 1421, the Saint Elizabeth flood broke the dikes and turned Dordrecht into an island, which it still is. The old story says ten thousand people drowned. Recent research suggests the real number was under two hundred, but the landscape changed for good.

And in 1572, in a former monastery here called Het Hof, representatives of the rebel cities met in secret. They rejected the Spanish king and recognised William of Orange as the leader of the revolt. It was the first step towards an independent Dutch state. So when you walk these streets in December, among the lights and the stalls, you are walking where the Netherlands began.

The water under this market is the Rhine. Not a canal named after it: the river itself, or what is left of its oldest course to the sea.

Two thousand years ago this branch, now called the Oude Rijn, was the main lower Rhine. It was also the northern border of the Roman Empire. The Romans built a chain of forts along its banks, and one of them, Matilo, stood just upstream from here, in what is now Leiderdorp. Beyond the river was the unconquered north.

Over the centuries the river silted up and lost its strength, and the people of Holland tamed it with dikes, locks and, from 1408, windmills to pump the water away. In Leiden it splits in two. The Nieuwe Rijn, the New Rhine, branches off and rejoins the other arm in the city centre. This market floats on that branch.

Look for the covered bridge, the Koornbrug. A bridge has stood there since the fifteenth century. The first stone of the present one was laid on the fifteenth of December 1642, which makes this its birthday month. In 1824 it got its two classical roofs, so grain traders could sell their corn on the bridge without it getting wet.

So you are shopping on a stretch of water where Roman soldiers once kept watch and grain merchants once haggled, in a city that has been trading on the Rhine for as long as it has existed.

The Museumplein started life as an empty plot of land behind a building site. The building site was the Rijksmuseum, still unfinished in 1883.

That summer, from May to October, Amsterdam used the empty land for an international exhibition, with pavilions from twenty-eight nations. More than a million people came. The main hall looked like a Moorish palace, with two great towers, but it was made of wood, plaster and painted cloth dressed up as marble. When the show was over, it all came down.

The exhibition changed the city anyway. Hotels were built or expanded for the visitors, including the Krasnapolsky, whose winter garden used electric light at a time when that was still a marvel. The gate at the entrance of the Vondelpark is a survivor from the exhibition. And a local brewery won a gold medal there, which it still prints on its labels today.

In 1885, with the Rijksmuseum finished, the street plan for the square was laid out to a design by its architect, Pierre Cuypers. Around it came the museums and the Concertgebouw that make this the cultural heart of Amsterdam. The square you see now was redesigned in 1999. The big red I amsterdam letters, once photographed by everyone, were taken away in December 2018.

In winter the long pond becomes an ice rink, and the Christmas village sets up beside it. So, in a way, the square is doing what it was first used for: a temporary show, for a few weeks, for visitors from all over the world.

You are inside one of the biggest event halls in the country, and its name is a bicycle.

In 1893 the Dutch bicycle industry started organising exhibitions to show off its newest models. The organisation was called the R.I., for Rijwiel-Industrie. Rijwiel is an old Dutch word for bicycle, literally a "riding wheel." In 1900 a new invention needed showing off too, and an A was added, for Automobiel. Rijwiel en Automobiel Industrie: the R.A.I.

The bicycles and cars have long since moved on, but the name stayed. Today the RAI has eleven exhibition halls covering about eighty-seven thousand square metres, and in the winter some of that space becomes Winter Paradise.

So while you are on a ride, at the ice rink or queueing for something warm, remember that it all started with a few Dutch manufacturers proudly lining up their bicycles. In a country with more bikes than people, that seems exactly right.

This castle looks medieval, and partly it is. But most of what you see was built a little over a century ago, with Rothschild money, by the same architect who built the Rijksmuseum.

There has been a castle here since at least 1391. It passed to the Van Zuylen family in 1440, was burned in 1482, and after the last owner died childless in 1641 it slowly fell into ruin. For two hundred years it was a romantic wreck.

In 1887 the heir, Etienne van Zuylen, married Baroness Hélène de Rothschild, of the banking family. Three years later he inherited the ruin, and with her family's money the couple decided to rebuild it. They hired Pierre Cuypers, and work began in 1892. Behind the medieval look it was very modern: electric light from its own generator, and central steam heating.

The rebuilding did not stop at the walls. The old village of Haarzuilens stood in the way of the new park, so it was demolished, except for the church, and rebuilt about a kilometre away in a fairy-tale medieval style. Van Zuylen ordered seven thousand fully grown trees for the park. To get them past the streets of Utrecht, he bought a house that was in the way and pulled it down.

In the Second World War the steward, Hendrik de Greef, kept the castle out of German hands. Since 2000 a foundation looks after it. So this Christmas fair is held in a dream of the Middle Ages, built in the age of electricity.

Tonight Heusden is lit by candles and fires. It suits the place, because this whole fortress town was once rebuilt by looking at an old picture of it.

Heusden grew up around a castle on the river Maas, and received its city rights in 1318. During the revolt against Spain, between 1579 and 1597, it was turned into a proper fortress, with moats, bastions, walls and ravelins, to hold the river.

Then came the disasters. In July 1680 lightning struck the castle's great tower, which was being used to store gunpowder. Around sixty thousand pounds of it exploded, and the castle was gone. In the nineteenth century the old defences were neglected and taken down.

The worst night came in November 1944. With the front line on the Maas, German troops blew up the town hall tower. It collapsed onto the cellars, where townspeople were sheltering, and 134 people died. The town was liberated hours later. Please take a moment for them if you pass the town hall.

What you see now is the result of a remarkable decision. From 1968 the town rebuilt its fortifications, using a map drawn by Joan Blaeu in 1649 as its guide. The restoration won a European prize in 1980. The outline of the castle was restored in 1987.

So the walls around you are both very old and quite new: a seventeenth-century fortress, carefully redrawn from a seventeenth-century map, glowing by candlelight.

Why is a village in Brabant pretending to be Victorian London? Because in 2004 a group of local business owners sat down and asked what they could do together for Christmas.

Their answer was Charles Dickens. Every December since, the centre of Drunen turns into a scene from his books, with chimney sweeps, ladies in crinolines, street urchins, carol singers and, of course, a few gentlemen who would rather nobody celebrated at all.

It is run almost entirely by volunteers. Around a hundred costumed extras take part, and before each edition they are coached on how people in the Victorian era walked, talked and behaved. Before the pandemic, around forty thousand visitors came each year, and it is free to get in.

Look out for Ebenezer Scrooge, the miser from A Christmas Carol, who sneers at Christmas until three ghosts change his mind. In Drunen he has been played for many years by the same local man, Hans Walters, who also makes Dickens-inspired drawings and prints.

A tip: do not just walk through. Stop, talk to the characters, and ask them about their lives. They stay in role, and that is half the fun.

The Brabanthallen are older than they look. They were built in 1931, designed by the architect Piet van Kessel, on the edge of 's-Hertogenbosch, the city everyone here simply calls Den Bosch.

For almost a century the halls have hosted fairs, exhibitions, concerts and big gatherings. They were renovated in 2004 and expanded in 2017, and today they are the third-largest event venue in the Netherlands, after the RAI in Amsterdam and the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht.

For the Christmas holidays the space becomes Winterland: a covered winter world where the weather outside does not matter. That is useful in a Dutch December, when it is more often wet than white.

If you have time before or after, the old centre of Den Bosch is a short walk or bus ride away. Look for the great cathedral of Saint John, and try the local speciality, the Bossche bol: a ball of choux pastry filled with cream and dipped in chocolate. It is the size of a fist, and not designed to be eaten elegantly.

This hall used to make things for the whole world. It still does, just on a smaller scale.

You are in the Klokgebouw, the Clock Building, in the middle of Strijp-S. In 1916 Philips built its first factory on this site, a glass works for light bulbs. From 1928 the complex grew fast, and the Klokgebouw was part of that growth. It produced Philite, Philips' own name for bakelite, the early plastic used for radio cases and telephones. Radios were assembled here too.

For most of the twentieth century Strijp-S was a closed city inside the city. In the 1970s around ten thousand people came to work here every day, and if you did not work for Philips, you did not get in. Eindhoven grew up around this company.

Then, slowly, Philips left. In 2002 the city and a developer bought the site, and over the following years the factories were opened up and turned into homes, studios, shops and event spaces. The Klokgebouw is now a national monument.

So the stalls around you, local designers, makers, small food producers, are working in a building where the products once came off a production line by the thousand. If you live in or around Eindhoven, there is a good chance someone in your street once had a grandparent who clocked in here.

The castle next to this market is one of the best preserved moated castles in the Netherlands, and it belongs to the people of Helmond because three women gave it to them.

Building started around 1325, replacing an older stronghold a few hundred metres to the west. Originally it had two rings of moats. Only the inner one survives, the water you see around the walls today. For six hundred years the castle passed between noble families: the Van Berlaers, the Van Cortenbachs from 1433, the Arbergs, and in 1781 a mint master called Carel Frederik Wesselman. In 1549 a fire badly damaged the west wing and the roofs, but the castle survived.

Then, in 1921, the widow of the last lord of Helmond and her two daughters handed the castle over to the town, on one condition: it had to be used by and for the public. In 1923, after a big renovation, it became Helmond's town hall. For decades, people came here to register births and get married.

When the town outgrew it in the 1970s, the council moved out, and in 1982 the castle became Museum Helmond.

So as you walk around the stalls on the Markt, look across the moat. That castle was not conquered, and it was not sold. It was given away, so that everyone could walk in.

For more than eight hundred years, this little town was its own country, and it was ruled by women.

Around the year 975 the Bishop of Utrecht, Ansfried, founded a convent here, on swampy ground near an old Roman road. Over time it became something unusual: a secular abbey of noblewomen, led by a princess-abbess, with a chapter of no more than twenty ladies from the highest nobility. They governed a tiny sovereign state inside the Holy Roman Empire, with its own courts and even its own coins. Thirty-three princess-abbesses ruled in turn.

The great white church at the centre was their abbey church. Its oldest parts go back to the tenth century; inside it is full Baroque.

It all ended with the French. Their armies arrived in the winter of 1794, and in 1797 the abbey and its little state were abolished. The noble ladies left.

Here is where the white comes from. The French introduced a tax based on how many windows your house had. Poorer families bricked up windows to pay less, and then painted their houses white to hide the patched brickwork. What began as a cover-up for poverty became the look that makes Thorn famous.

So, as you walk the cobbled streets between the stalls, every white wall is a small piece of that story.

Middachten looks calm and elegant, sitting in its moat. It was built that way on purpose, after the previous castle was destroyed by a retreating army.

There has been a castle on this spot since at least 1190, when it belonged to a man named Jacobus de Mithdac, from whom the name comes. For centuries it was a fortified house on the edge of the Veluwe.

Then came the war of 1672 and 1673. When the French were driven back after the Dutch stadtholder William the Third captured Bonn, their troops destroyed the castle on the way out.

The new owners, Godard van Ginkel and his wife Ursula van Raesfelt, rebuilt it between 1693 and 1698. They wanted it to look like the most fashionable house of the day: Het Loo, the new palace of William the Third, just up the road near Apeldoorn. The architects Jacobus Roman and Steven Vennecool gave them exactly that.

The gardens followed the fashions too: first a formal garden inspired by Versailles, then an English landscape park in the late eighteenth century, and around 1900 a partial return to the original style, made by the garden designer Hugo Poortman for the Bentinck family.

Middachten is now a national monument and counts among the top one hundred heritage sites of the Netherlands. At Christmas it opens its doors, so you get to see the inside of a house that was built to impress, more than three hundred years ago.

People have been buying and selling on this square for about a thousand years. The Grote Markt has held Groningen's weekly and yearly markets since the town was a village called Cruoninga.

The tower watching over you is the Martinitoren, and it has looked down on this square for more than five hundred years. The town hall, with its classical columns, replaced a medieval stone one in 1810.

Not everything here is as old as it looks. In April 1945, during the battle to liberate the city, large parts of the north, east and west sides of the square were destroyed. They were rebuilt bit by bit after the war, and the square has been reshaped several times since. Buses only left it in 2021.

Today, for a few days, it hosts something from much further north: a Swedish Christmas market. In Sweden the season really begins with Lucia, on the thirteenth of December, the name day of Saint Lucia. It grew out of an ancient midwinter festival of light. A girl in a white dress wears a crown of candles and leads a procession of singers through the dark.

That suits this place. In the darkest part of the year, a thousand-year-old market square fills up with candles, warm drinks and people. Some traditions travel well.

Wezup is tiny. About a hundred and seventy people live here, almost exactly as many as in 1840. And yet every December thousands of visitors come, because the whole village opens its barns.

The name first appears in 1284, as Wesepe, which means something like "brook through the meadow." It is a classic Drenthe esdorp: a farming village grouped around a village green, with the farmhouses close together and the fields, the essen, around them.

For centuries the farmers here ran their own affairs. From 1488 Wezup was a boermarke, a self-governing community where the farmers decided together how to share the common land, the grazing and the work. It is a very Drenthe way of doing things: practical, collective, and without much fuss.

The Christmas market works in the same spirit. It is organised by a small local committee, and the stalls are not in a square but inside the old barns and sheds of the farms. You walk from one barn to the next, and some visitors arrive by covered tractor wagon from the car park.

So look around while you shop. The beams over your head have sheltered hay and cattle for generations. For one weekend a year, they shelter Christmas instead.

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.

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.

Stand in the middle of the Vrijthof and turn around once. Two churches. The big Romanesque one is the Basilica of Saint Servatius. The slim red tower next to it belongs to Saint John's. Two churches on one square, almost touching, built by people who did not agree with each other. That is Maastricht in one picture.

This square is older than the city's streets. In the late Roman period it was a cemetery. When archaeologists dug here in 1969 before the car park went in, they found the graves of the early Middle Ages. In 2003 they dug on the north side and found thirteen layers of the Via Belgica, the Roman road from the coast to Cologne, one on top of the other.

The name Vrijthof first appears in writing in 1223, when the emperor handed the ground to the canons of Saint Servatius. For centuries it was the city's stage, and not always a kind one. A rebellious mayor of Liège was beheaded here in 1408. Fifteen Anabaptists were burned here in 1535. Under the French it was renamed Place des Armes, a parade ground.

And every seven years, still today, the pilgrimage of the relics ends on this square, with tens of thousands of people. In summer André Rieu plays here to crowds that fill every chair. In winter the square becomes this: an ice rink, a Ferris wheel, rows of wooden chalets, and one of the very few Dutch Christmas markets that is open on Christmas Day itself.

One thing to look for: the café In den Ouden Vogelstruys on the corner. It opened in 1730 and claims to be the oldest in the city. The glühwein there is served with three hundred years of practice.

From the ground, Bourtange looks like a pretty village: a church, a windmill, brick houses around a small square. From the air it is a star. Five points, two rings of water, and a single road in. Nothing about this place is accidental.

In the 1580s the Dutch were fighting Spain, and the city of Groningen was in Spanish hands. There was exactly one road through the marshes between Groningen and Germany, and it ran over a strip of sand called Bourtange. William of Orange ordered a fort built on that sand. It was finished in 1593, and the marsh did half the work: an army could only come at it along the one road, straight into the guns.

The Spanish tried, soon after it was finished, and failed. In 1672, the year the Dutch call the Disaster Year, the Bishop of Münster arrived with an army and demanded surrender. The commander, a Captain Protts, refused. The frontal assault broke on the ramparts and the bog. The fort was never taken.

Then the wars moved on, the marshes were drained, and the star stopped mattering. In 1851 the army gave it up and it became an ordinary village. The ramparts were ploughed, the moats silted, and for a century Bourtange was simply a place at the end of the road.

In 1960 the local council made an unusual decision. They would rebuild the whole fort as it looked around 1740 and turn it into a museum you could live in. So the star you are standing inside is both four hundred years old and sixty years old at the same time.

One thing to look for: before you leave, climb the rampart behind the stalls and look out over the water. In December, at dusk, you see what the Spanish soldiers saw. There is still only one road in.

Every December, for one weekend, nine hundred and fifty people in Deventer put on top hats and bonnets and stop being Dutch. Scrooge walks the Bergkwartier. Oliver Twist begs on the Walstraat. Carol singers block the alleys. And more than sixty thousand visitors shuffle through in a queue that the organisers now manage with time slots, because it used to stretch for hours.

It started with a shopkeeper's wife. In 1991 Emmy Strik had an idea for the Walstraat, the street where she and her husband Jan had their shop: dress the street up as Victorian London for a weekend, in the spirit of Charles Dickens. She took it to the city. The city was not interested. So she and Jan did it themselves, on their own street, with their neighbours.

That was the first edition. This is the thirty-fourth. The festival has long since spilled out of the Walstraat into the whole Bergkwartier, the oldest quarter of Deventer, with its crooked medieval houses that need no set dressing at all. The characters are volunteers, many of them regulars who have played the same role for decades, and there is a waiting list to join.

Why does it work here? Because Deventer is already a nineteenth-century city at heart: a Hanseatic trading town that got rich, got quiet, and kept its buildings. Add gas lamps, chestnuts and a brass band, and the illusion costs almost nothing.

One thing to look for: the Charles Dickens Cabinet on the Walstraat, the street where it all began. And if you want to skip the queue, come early, on Saturday, and enter through the Keizerstraat, the only way in.

Hundreds of stalls fill the old town of Haarlem for three days, and all of them lead back to this square. The Grote Markt has been the centre of the city for eight hundred years, and almost everything around you has a story.

Start with the town hall on the west side. It began in the twelfth century as a palace of the Counts of Holland, and some thirteenth-century beams are still inside. Across from it stands the church: the Grote Kerk, Saint Bavo's, finished in the early fifteen hundreds with a cedar roof completed in 1538. Inside is the Müller organ, built between 1735 and 1738. When it was finished it was the largest organ in the world. Handel played it. Mendelssohn played it. And in 1766 a ten-year-old boy on a tour of Europe played it: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Up in the tower hang two small bells called the Damiaatjes. The legend says Haarlem knights brought them back from Egypt during the Crusades. The truth is that a bell founder from Aalst gave them to the bishop in 1562. Either way, for centuries they rang every evening from nine until half past, the signal that the city gates were closing. If you hear bells at nine tonight, that is what they mean.

Next to the church is the Vleeshal, the meat hall, built in 1603 and far too grand for selling meat, which was rather the point. And in the middle of the square stands Laurens Janszoon Coster, the printer Haarlem insists invented movable type before Gutenberg did. The statue went up in 1856. The argument is still going.

One thing to look for: on the Sunday afternoon, when the square is shoulder to shoulder, step into the church. It is quiet, it is warm, and the organ is right there.

That ball of fried dough dusted with icing sugar is an oliebol, an oil ball, and the Dutch will tell you it is strictly a New Year's Eve food. They will tell you this while eating one in November at a Christmas market. Order it warm, ask for extra sugar, and if it has raisins in it that is the classic version. One oliebol is a snack. Three is a meal. Five is a decision you will discuss with your doctor.

Hot red wine with cinnamon, cloves and orange. In Germany it is Glühwein and comes in a mug you pay a deposit on. In the Netherlands the old name is bisschopswijn, bishop's wine, because it was drunk on Saint Nicholas' feast, and it is usually poured into a paper cup for a euro or two less than across the border. Same drink. Less ceremony. If the stall offers a shot of rum or amaretto in it, that is a Schuss, and it is how the Germans survive December.