Naarden Fortress

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. The town itself is older than its walls. It received city rights in 1300, the only town in the Gooi region to do so, and the present town was laid out around 1350. Its most terrible moment came on 1 December 1572, during the Dutch Revolt, when Spanish troops under Don Fadrique, son of the Duke of Alba, reached the medieval walls. The townspeople opened the gates in the hope of mercy; the soldiers killed around seven hundred of them, burned the town and pulled down its defences. The massacre hardened the rebels' resolve, and the building where it began, the Spanish House, still stands, with a plaque recalling what happened there.

The ramparts that followed went through several generations. Early bastions in the Old Dutch manner were laid out after 1572, with Adriaen Anthonisz as the main designer. The French took the neglected fortress without a fight in 1672 and added ravelins and a palisaded outer line, but lost it the next year to William III of Orange, who then ordered a complete rebuilding. The design was drawn up by Adriaan Dortsman with the help of Nicolaas Witsen, and after years of sabotage by an Amsterdam city government that saw the new fortress as a threat rather than a shield, the work was completed by Willem Paen; by 1685 the present double belt of walls and water was finished. Contrary to a popular belief, the celebrated engineer Menno van Coehoorn had no hand in it: he in fact criticised a fortress remarkably like Naarden in the preface of his own treatise.

What makes the place so satisfying is how complete it is. Six bastions, named Katten, Oranje, Promers, Turfpoort, Nieuw Molen and Oud Molen, alternate with six ravelins set on their own islands in the moat; beyond them lies a second moat and an outer rampart. In the gorges of several bastions are the cannon vaults and powder magazines of 1679–1685, and after 1870 the army added bomb-proof barracks under the earth, sunken mortar casemates in the salient points, and even a bomb-proof hospital and bakery. The Turfpoort bastion has housed the Dutch Fortress Museum since 1955. Naarden was also the northern anchor of the Holland water lines, the belts of land that could be flooded against an invader, and the fort of Ronduit on its north side marks the very end of the New Dutch Water Line. The garrison left in 1926, and most of the works were restored between 1964 and 1987.

Inside the walls, the town rewards a slow walk. The Great Church, the fifteenth-century church of St Vitus, survived the fire of 1572 and has wooden vaults painted with scenes from the Old and New Testaments, uncovered during restoration; each Good Friday it hosts a performance of Bach's St Matthew Passion. The seventeenth-century Czech educator John Amos Comenius is buried in a mausoleum in the town, visited by many travellers from his homeland. The clean star shape is so distinctive from above that Allied bomber crews returning from Germany during the Second World War used it as a landmark. The outer works, restored in 2008–2010, are best seen from the water on a boat trip around the moats.

Getting there

Naarden-Vesting lies in the Gooi region of North Holland, in the municipality of Gooise Meren, next to the town of Bussum. The nearest airport is Amsterdam Airport Schiphol (AMS), about 27 km away. The nearest railway station is Naarden-Bussum, with direct trains to Amsterdam, Utrecht, Amersfoort and Almere.