De Haar Castle — castle
Paul van de Velde from Netherlands · CC BY 2.0

De Haar Castle

  • 2 min read
  • 52.121° N 4.986° E

Interesting facts

  • Around 1895 the baron had about 7,000 fully grown trees dug up elsewhere and replanted at De Haar so the new park would look mature at once.
  • The castle holds a collection of some 4,000 objects, including top-quality 16th-century tapestries, liveries and silverware.
  • Among its treasures is a palanquin made for the wife of a Japanese shogun, one of only two known, the other being in Tokyo.
  • The kitchen range alone is about six metres long.
  • During the Second World War the castle's steward, Hendrik de Greef, managed to keep the occupying Germans from seizing the estate.
  • Cuypers did not work alone: his son Joseph Cuypers shared in the twenty-year rebuilding.
  • The oldest known picture of the castle dates from 1554, long before its ruin and romantic resurrection.
  • Castle and gardens cover about 45 hectares, while the surrounding estate of some 400 hectares passed to the Dutch nature conservation society Natuurmonumenten.
  • The castle has served as a film set, including for the Dutch children's series De Club van Sinterklaas in 2005 and 2006.

Why it is worth it

Kasteel de Haar is the largest castle in the Netherlands, and almost all of what you see is a dream of the 1890s. A castle stood here from at least 1391, when the De Haar family held it as a fief; it was burned and its walls slighted in 1482, rebuilt, and after the last Van Zuylen van de Haar died childless in 1641 it slowly fell to ruin. In 1890 the ruin passed to Baron Etienne van Zuylen van Nyevelt, who had married Hélène de Rothschild a few years earlier. With her family's fortune behind him, he set out to raise a medieval castle more complete than any that had actually survived.

The architect was Pierre Cuypers, the man behind the Rijksmuseum and Amsterdam Centraal, who worked on De Haar from 1892 to 1912. He kept the surviving medieval fabric and built a Gothic Revival fortress over and around it: moats, drawbridges, a cluster of towers and steep roofs, and inside a lofty galleried hall, carved wood, painted vaults and some 200 rooms with 30 bathrooms. Behind the medieval costume sat the latest comforts of the day, electric light from the castle's own generator and steam central heating. The kitchens still hold a vast battery of copper pots, the largest such set left in the country.

The grand gesture extended to the landscape. To lay out the park, the baron had the old village of Haarzuilens demolished, all but its church, and rebuilt for its inhabitants about a kilometre away in matching romantic style. Hendrik Copijn designed the grounds, planting thousands of mature trees brought in for the purpose, and the park now combines formal gardens, a rose garden, ponds and long avenues. For over a century the family kept a tradition of staying at De Haar each September and filling it with guests; visitors in those weeks included Coco Chanel, Maria Callas, Gregory Peck, Yves Saint Laurent and Brigitte Bardot. Since 2000 castle and gardens have belonged to a foundation, and a long restoration was completed in 2011.

Getting there

De Haar stands on the edge of Haarzuilens, in the province of Utrecht, about 4 km from Maarssen. The nearest airport is Amsterdam Airport Schiphol (AMS), roughly 26 km away. Regional buses from Utrecht Centraal serve Haarzuilens, and the castle has visitor parking.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in the Kingdom of the Netherlands 25The Most Beautiful 19th-Century Castles 5The Most Beautiful 19th-Century Castles, Palaces and Fortresses 16The Most Beautiful Castles 94The Most Beautiful Castles, Palaces and Fortresses 302

From the encyclopaedia

De Haar Castle is located outside Utrecht, Netherlands. It is the largest castle in The Netherlands.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

52.12143, 4.98635per Wikidata