The Most Beautiful Places in the Kingdom of the Netherlands
25 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in the Kingdom of the Netherlands are Keukenhof, Windmills at Kinderdijk and Amsterdam Canal Ring. The list covers 25 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Much of the Netherlands is a landscape people made. For centuries the Dutch have drained lakes into polders, built dikes against the sea and rivers, and used windmills to pump the water out, so that canals, mills and dead-flat fields are as much part of its beauty as any natural feature. The wealth of the seventeenth-century Golden Age filled the cities with merchants' houses and art, and the twentieth century added a strong tradition of modern design.
The windmills of Kinderdijk, built in the eighteenth century to drain the Alblasserwaard polder, stand in rows along the water and form one of the country's World Heritage sites, while Zaanse Schans gathers working mills and wooden houses along the Zaan. Amsterdam's seventeenth-century Canal Ring is another, its gabled houses following concentric waterways, and in Giethoorn boats still serve as the main way through the old village.
The variety continues. Bourtange is a restored star fort whose bastions and moats form a perfect geometric figure, Keukenhof bursts into millions of spring bulbs at Lisse, and the Rijksmuseum by Pierre Cuypers holds Rembrandt's Night Watch. Teylers Museum in Haarlem, opened in 1784, is the oldest museum in the country, and Gerrit Rietveld's Schröder House in Utrecht turned De Stijl painting into architecture. Rotterdam's Market Hall arches a giant painted ceiling over food stalls, Efteling has a fairy-tale forest dating from the 1950s, and Madurodam builds the whole country in miniature.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Keukenhof | Botanical garden | |
| 2 | Windmills at Kinderdijk | Windmill | |
| 3 | Amsterdam Canal Ring | Canal | |
| 4 | De Haar Castle | Castle | |
| 5 | Giethoorn | Most beautiful village | |
| 6 | Bourtange | Star fort | |
| 7 | Market Hall | Covered passageway | |
| 8 | Zaanse Schans | Open-air museum | |
| 9 | Van Gogh Museum | Museum | |
| 10 | Rijksmuseum | Museum | |
| 11 | Anne Frank House | Museum | |
| 12 | Efteling | Amusement park | |
| 13 | Rietveld Schröder House | Museum | ✓ |
| 14 | Madurodam | Miniature park | |
| 15 | Teylers Museum | Science museum | |
| 16 | Van Nelle Factory | Factory | ✓ |
| 17 | Portuguese Synagogue, Amsterdam | Synagogue | |
| 18 | Kröller-Müller Museum | Museum | |
| 19 | Mauritshuis | Museum | |
| 20 | Tuschinski Theatre | Theatre building | |
| 21 | Eise Eisinga Planetarium | Museum | ✓ |
| 22 | Cube Houses | Monument | |
| 23 | Mozesbrug | Bridge | |
| 24 | Dominican Church | Church building | |
| 25 | Naarden Fortress | Star fort |
01 Keukenhof
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 13.6 km from Haarlem52.269° N 4.547° E
Image by baruya from Pixabay For eight weeks each spring, a 32-hectare park near Lisse turns into one of the largest flower displays anywhere.
Did you know? In its first season in 1950, the new flower show drew more than 300,000 visitors.
02 Windmills at Kinderdijk
Kinderdijkse molens
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 11.4 km from Rotterdam51.889° N 4.635° E
Image by FeelHype from Pixabay Few places show so plainly how the Dutch made their own ground. At Kinderdijk, where the Lek and the Noord meet on the edge of the Alblasserwaard, nineteen windmills stand in long lines beside the drainage channels, the largest surviving group of old mills anywhere in the Netherlands.
Did you know? The Overwaard mills lift water with scoop wheels about 6.7 metres across, turned by the sails through gearing inside the mill body.
03 Amsterdam Canal Ring
Amsterdamse grachten
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 2.3 km from Amsterdam52.365° N 4.888° E
Image by Rianne_SchillerMclean from Pixabay The canal ring of Amsterdam is one of the great pieces of planned city-making in Europe. In 1613 the city began digging a set of concentric waterways around its medieval core, and three of them, the Herengracht, the Keizersgracht and the Prinsengracht, became the grand arcs that still define the centre.
Did you know? Every year between 12,000 and 15,000 bicycles are fished out of Amsterdam's canals.
04 De Haar Castle
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 9.5 km from Utrecht52.121° N 4.986° E
Paul van de Velde from Netherlands · CC BY 2.0 Kasteel de Haar is the largest castle in the Netherlands, and almost all of what you see is a dream of the 1890s.
Did you know? The kitchen range alone is about six metres long.
05 Giethoorn
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 24 km from Zwolle52.740° N 6.077° E
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay Giethoorn is a village where water takes the place of streets. In its old core the farmhouses stand on small islands of peat, each reached by its own wooden footbridge, and much of the village is threaded by narrow canals rather than roads.
Did you know? The Mennonite church that still stands in the village, De Vermaning, was built in 1871.
06 Bourtange
Kingdom of the Netherlands53.007° N 7.192° E
Image by frankvogelezang from Pixabay Seen from the air, Bourtange is a perfect geometric flower: a five-pointed star of green ramparts, ringed by a second star of moats, outworks and water, with a tiny village packed into the centre.
Did you know? The great rebuilding of 1738 to 1742 was designed by the engineer Peter de la Rive on the orders of the States General.
07 Market Hall
Markthal
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 0.6 km from Rotterdam51.920° N 4.487° E
Exmpletree · CC BY-SA 3.0 Step inside the Markthal and the ceiling explodes into colour: an 11,000-square-metre mural of giant fruit, vegetables, grain, fish, flowers and insects curves overhead like the inside of a vast horseshoe, with market stalls and food halls on the floor beneath.
Did you know? To muffle the pile-driving, shipping containers were stacked around the site, and nearby shopkeepers kept their doors shut to hear their customers.
08 Zaanse Schans
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 15.1 km from Amsterdam52.474° N 4.816° E
Image by 3345557 from Pixabay The Zaanse Schans is a riverside village of green wooden houses and working windmills on the bank of the Zaan, just north of Amsterdam.
Did you know? The original De Kat burned down in 1781 and was rebuilt within a year, before stopping work in 1904.
09 Van Gogh Museum
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 2.4 km from Amsterdam52.358° N 4.881° E
GoldenArtists · CC BY 4.0 No other museum holds as much of Vincent van Gogh's work: about 200 paintings, 400 drawings and 700 of his letters. The collection survived because his family kept it. When Vincent died in 1890 his unsold work went to his brother Theo, who died six months later.
10 Rijksmuseum
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 2.2 km from Amsterdam52.360° N 4.885° E
Image by user32212 from Pixabay The Rijksmuseum is the national museum of the Netherlands and the place to understand the Dutch Golden Age in one visit. It was founded in The Hague in 1798, moved to Amsterdam in 1808 on the orders of Louis Bonaparte, and spent decades in borrowed rooms before Pierre Cuypers won a competition for a new building.
Did you know? In April 1942 much of the collection was hidden in a purpose-built vault deep in the tunnels of the Sint-Pietersberg hill near Maastricht.
11 Anne Frank House
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 3.3 km from Amsterdam52.375° N 4.884° E
Lệ Xuân · CC BY-SA 4.0 From the street, Prinsengracht 263 is an ordinary Amsterdam canal house: built in 1635, refaced in 1740, used over the centuries as a home, a stable-fronted warehouse and a workshop. What makes it one of the most visited museums in the Netherlands is the building behind it.
12 Efteling
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 18.9 km from 's-Hertogenbosch51.650° N 5.048° E
Rémih · CC BY-SA 4.0 Efteling began as a village idea rather than a business plan.
Did you know? The park greeted its 123,456,789th visitor on 19 June 2015.
13 Rietveld Schröder House
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 2.5 km from Utrecht52.085° N 5.148° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Joop Elsinga · CC0 The Rietveld Schröder House, completed in 1924 at the end of an ordinary brick terrace in Utrecht, is the purest built expression of De Stijl, the Dutch movement of primary colours and straight lines best known through the paintings of Piet Mondrian.
Did you know? The house included a garage, although Truus Schröder did not own a car.
14 Madurodam
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 2.9 km from The Hague52.099° N 4.298° E
Cqui · CC BY-SA 2.5 Madurodam is a whole country shrunk to a scale of 1:25.
Did you know? The park covers 3.7 hectares, of which the built miniature city itself takes up about 1.8 hectares.
15 Teylers Museum
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 0.7 km from Haarlem52.381° N 4.640° E
Image by 12019 from Pixabay Teylers Museum in Haarlem is the oldest museum in the Netherlands and a rare surviving museum of the Enlightenment: a place where each room was fitted out in the spirit of its own time and then, remarkably, left almost untouched.
Did you know? Besides Michelangelo and Rembrandt, its drawings collection includes sheets by Raphael, Guercino and Claude Lorrain.
16 Van Nelle Factory
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 3.1 km from Rotterdam51.923° N 4.434° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
F.Eveleens · CC BY 3.0 On the bank of the Schie on the north-western edge of Rotterdam stands the building that Le Corbusier called the most beautiful spectacle of the modern age.
Did you know? Men and women on the staff used strictly separate staircases, and the building even included a concealed corridor for the inspector.
17 Portuguese Synagogue, Amsterdam
Portugees-Israëlietische Synagoge
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 1.8 km from Amsterdam52.367° N 4.905° E
Tadeáš Bednarz · CC BY-SA 4.0 When the Sephardi community of Amsterdam — descendants of Jews who had fled Portugal and Spain — opened its new synagogue on 2 August 1675, it was the largest synagogue in the world. The architect was Elias Bouwman, and work had begun only four years earlier, in April 1671.
Did you know? Even today the main sanctuary has no electrical system at all, so evening services rely entirely on candlelight.
18 Kröller-Müller Museum
Kröller Müller Museum
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 14 km from Arnhem52.096° N 5.817° E
Ziko van Dijk · CC BY-SA 4.0 Deep in the heathland and pine forest of the Hoge Veluwe National Park, the Kröller-Müller Museum holds one of the most personal art collections ever turned into a public museum. It was assembled by Helene Kröller-Müller, wife of a wealthy industrialist, who began buying art on the advice of the teacher and critic H.
Did you know? After a serious operation in 1911 that she expected not to survive, Helene Kröller-Müller decided her collection should one day belong to the Dutch people.
19 Mauritshuis
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 3 km from The Hague52.080° N 4.314° E
Image by AJEL from Pixabay The Mauritshuis is a small museum with an outsized collection. The building itself is a textbook of Dutch Classicism: a strictly symmetrical two-storey house designed by Jacob van Campen and Pieter Post and built between 1636 and 1641 for John Maurice of Nassau-Siegen while he governed Dutch Brazil.
Did you know? Because its pale stone and its builder's fortune came from sugar plantations in Brazil, the house was mockingly nicknamed the Sugar House.
20 Tuschinski Theatre
Koninklijk Theater Tuschinski
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 2.1 km from Amsterdam52.366° N 4.894° E
User:DirkvdM · CC BY-SA 3.0 Behind a facade flanked by two towers in a narrow street off Amsterdam's Rembrandtplein lies one of the most extravagant cinema interiors ever built.
Did you know? The design is credited to Hijman Louis de Jong, though Willem Kromhout was involved from the start and took over after disputes.
21 Eise Eisinga Planetarium
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 17.5 km from Leeuwarden53.187° N 5.544° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
bertknot from scarborough, australia · CC BY-SA 2.0 Between 1774 and 1781 Eise Eisinga, a wool comber and self-taught astronomer in the Frisian town of Franeker, built a working model of the solar system into the ceiling of his own living room.
22 Cube Houses
Kubuswoningen
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 0.9 km from Rotterdam51.920° N 4.490° E
Image by KSPhotography from Pixabay Above a busy road in the centre of Rotterdam, a row of yellow cubes stands on end, each one tipped onto a corner and balanced on a six-sided concrete pillar. Linked edge to edge, they form a jagged canopy over a raised pedestrian street, with slanting walls and windows tilted towards the sky and the pavement below.
Did you know? In Helmond some 60 cube houses were planned, but only 18 were built around Blom's theatre 't Speelhuis, which was hit by fire in December 2011.
23 Mozesbrug
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 35 km from Antwerp51.529° N 4.301° E
Digital Eye · CC BY-SA 4.0 This is a bridge designed to be invisible from a distance and slightly disorienting up close.
Did you know? The designers, Ro Koster and Ad Kil of RO&AD Architecten, deliberately avoided a float-switch pump for fear it would run dry and fail.
24 Dominican Church
Dominicanenkerk
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 1 km from Maastricht50.850° N 5.690° E
Loek Tangel · CC BY-SA 4.0 Rows of black steel bookshelves now rise three storeys high beneath the Gothic vaults of Maastricht's Dominican Church, one of the most striking adaptations of a medieval building in Europe. The church was built for the Dominican friars in the second half of the thirteenth century and consecrated in 1294.
Did you know? Another band of the painting tells the legend of ten thousand martyred Roman soldiers, shown dressed as crusader knights.
25 Naarden Fortress
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 21.6 km from Utrecht52.293° N 5.158° E
Helfmann · CC BY-SA 3.0 Naarden is one of the best-preserved fortified towns in Europe, and one of the few where the whole system can still be read at a glance: a small grid of streets inside a double ring of ramparts and moats, laid out as a six-pointed star on the flat, watery land east of Amsterdam.
Did you know? After the Franco-Prussian War, bombproof barracks were dug into the bastions, along with a bombproof hospital, a bakery and sunken mortar casemates.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in the Kingdom of the Netherlands?
- On our list, Keukenhof ranks first, followed by Windmills at Kinderdijk and Amsterdam Canal Ring.
- Why are there so many windmills at Kinderdijk?
- The mills were built in the eighteenth century to pump water out of the low-lying Alblasserwaard polder into the river. Together with pumping stations and dikes, they are a World Heritage site illustrating Dutch water management.
- What is the oldest museum in the Netherlands?
- Teylers Museum in Haarlem, which opened in 1784, is the oldest museum in the country. It preserves its original Oval Room with collections of fossils, instruments and art.
- What is a star fort?
- A star fort is a fortification with angled bastions projecting from its walls, designed so defenders could cover every approach with crossfire. Bourtange, founded in the late sixteenth century, is one of the best-preserved examples in the Netherlands.
- What kinds of places are there to see in the Kingdom of the Netherlands?
- In our collection, the places in the Kingdom of the Netherlands are most often museums (7), star forts (2), botanical gardens (1) and churches (1).
- How many places are on this list in the Kingdom of the Netherlands?
- The list covers 25 places.