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Zaanse Schans in the NetherlandsSee Working Windmills & Historical Houses in Zaandam near Amsterdam
Working Dutch industrial windmills and historical buildings can be seen at Zaanse Schans in Zaandam on a self-guided day-trip from Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
Despite windmills being imprinted in the mind of many visitors as the most typical of Dutch scenes, it is quite possible to visit Amsterdam, and indeed the Netherlands, without seeing a single one. The easiest way to see historical working windmills near Amsterdam is to take a self-guided half-day trip to Zaanse Schans in Zaandam just north of the Dutch capital. From the 1960s onwards, windmills and historic houses have been restored or moved to the Zaanse Schans area to preserve them. Currently, there are eight windmills as well as several mostly seventeenth and eighteenth-century dark-green wooden buildings that house museums and traditional workshops.
The Windmills of Zaanse Schans near AmsterdamZaanse Schans has six large industrial mills on the bank of the Zaan River – during the nineteenth century, around 400 mills worked on the banks of the Zaan and in total over a thousand were built since the construction of the first one in 1597. The six industrial windmills at Zaanse Schans are:
Admission to each windmill, if and when open, is €2.50 per mill. Museums and Workshops at the Zaanse SchansIn addition to the windmills, Zaanse Schans has five museums on site:
In addition to the museums, traditional crafts are demonstrated in several shops. These demonstrations include cheese making (kaasmakerij), pewter making (tingieterij), and the wooden shoe workshop (klompenmakerij). Zaanse Schans Visitors Information: Opening Hours, Fees, and RestaurantsAdmission to the Zaanse Schans site is free as it is laid out as a real town but admission is charged to individual windmills and museums. The lack of a central administration means that all sights set individual opening hours with admission charges ranging from €1 to €4.50. In general, all sights are closed in winter on weekdays. Although some sights are open, Monday is never a good day to visit. Even in summer, some mills are only working on weekends with Saturday generally a better bet than Sunday. Two interesting restaurants in seventeenth-century buildings offer alternatives to returning to Amsterdam for dining:
From April to September, the Zaanse Schans can also be seen from pleasure boats on the Zaan River. The first around 50-minute cruise departs at 11 am.
Public Transportation to Zaanse SchansZaanse Schans is easily reached from Amsterdam Centraal Station:
The largest collection of historical windmills in the Netherlands is the 19 windmills at Kinderdijk in South Holland. Kinderdijk is a popular day trip from Rotterdam and day excursions are also available from Amsterdam and other Dutch cities. Besides windmills, the mainstay of tourist images of rural Holland is flower bulb fields. These can be seen easily on various day-trips from Amsterdam but the best show is the tulip flower garden annually planted at Keukenhof near Lisse.
The copyright of the article Zaanse Schans in the Netherlands in Netherlands Travel is owned by Henk Bekker. Permission to republish Zaanse Schans in the Netherlands in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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