The Most Beautiful Places in South Holland
7 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in South Holland are Market Hall, Keukenhof and Windmills at Kinderdijk. The list covers 7 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
South Holland is the low heart of the Netherlands: much of it lies below sea level in polders reclaimed from lakes and marshes, drained for centuries by windmills and guarded by dikes. Behind the coastal dunes, sandy soil made it the home of the bulb fields, while its cities split the national roles between them. The Hague is the seat of government, and Rotterdam, whose centre was destroyed in the bombing of May 1940, rebuilt itself as a proving ground for modern architecture.
At Kinderdijk, a row of eighteenth-century windmills still stands along the drainage canals of the Alblasserwaard, the classic picture of the Dutch fight with water. Keukenhof, near Lisse, plants its gardens with millions of tulips, hyacinths and daffodils each spring. In The Hague, the Mauritshuis keeps Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring and View of Delft in a seventeenth-century town palace, and Madurodam rebuilds the whole country at a scale of one to twenty-five.
Rotterdam shows the other side of the province. The Van Nelle Factory, a glass-walled coffee, tea and tobacco plant of the late 1920s, is a landmark of the modern movement. Piet Blom's Cube Houses tilt yellow cubes on concrete posts, and the Market Hall wraps apartments around a great horseshoe arch whose ceiling is covered with a giant mural of fruit, flowers and fish.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Market Hall | Covered passageway | |
| 2 | Keukenhof | Botanical garden | |
| 3 | Windmills at Kinderdijk | Windmill | |
| 4 | Madurodam | Miniature park | |
| 5 | Van Nelle Factory | Factory | ✓ |
| 6 | Mauritshuis | Museum | |
| 7 | Cube Houses | Monument |
01 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.
02 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.
03 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.
04 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.
05 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.
06 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.
07 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.
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 South Holland?
- On our list, Market Hall ranks first, followed by Keukenhof and Windmills at Kinderdijk.
- Why were the windmills at Kinderdijk built?
- They pumped water out of the low-lying polders of the Alblasserwaard into higher reservoirs and the river, keeping the land dry enough to live on and farm.
- What scale is Madurodam?
- Madurodam's models of Dutch buildings, ports and landscapes are built at a scale of 1:25.
- Why does Rotterdam have so much modern architecture?
- The German bombing of May 1940 destroyed most of the historic city centre, and the decades of rebuilding turned Rotterdam into a testing ground for modern design, from the Cube Houses to the Market Hall.
- What kinds of places are there to see in South Holland?
- In our collection, the places in South Holland are most often botanical gardens (1), windmills (1), factories (1) and shopping arcades and passages (1).
- How many places are on this list in South Holland?
- The list covers 7 places.