5 Days in Rotterdam

Start at the Markthal, opened in 2014: a giant horseshoe of 228 apartments arching over a covered food market, designed by the Rotterdam firm MVRDV. Walk in and look up. The inside of the arch is covered by Hoorn des Overvloeds, the "Horn of Plenty", an 11,000 m² mural of fruit, vegetables, fish and flowers by Arno Coenen and Iris Roskam, one of the biggest artworks in the country.

Below it, dozens of stalls and shops sell cheese, stroopwafels, Spanish ham, Indonesian snacks and coffee. It's touristy, but it's still a market, so have breakfast here. On Tuesday and Saturday the open-air Binnenrotte market fills the square outside, one of the biggest in the country.

Across the road are the Cube Houses (Kubuswoningen) by Piet Blom, finished in 1984: 38 yellow cubes tipped 45 degrees onto their corners and set on concrete pillars, so they form a "forest" over a pedestrian bridge. People really live in them. One, the Kijk-Kubus, is open as a show home for a few euros, and it's the best way to see how you fit furniture into rooms with sloping walls.

Below them is the Oude Haven, the old harbor, with historic barges, café terraces and the Witte Huis, a white Art Nouveau office building from 1898 that was once one of the tallest office buildings in Europe and survived the bombing.

Back behind the Markthal stands the Laurenskerk, built in 1449-1525 and the only late-medieval building left in the center. On 14 May 1940 it burned out completely, and only the outer walls and the tower survived. It was rebuilt over the next quarter century and has become the symbol of the city that came back. On its open days you can go in and climb the tower.

In front of it stands a bronze statue of Erasmus, the great humanist, born in Rotterdam around 1466, reading a book. Hendrick de Keyser made it in 1622. The university and the bridge you'll cross on day three carry his name.

Have lunch the Dutch way, standing at a fish stall. Order kibbeling, chunks of white fish fried in batter with a garlic sauce, or a haring: raw herring, lightly salted, eaten with chopped onion or held by the tail and lowered into your mouth. The new season's herring, Hollandse Nieuwe, arrives in June, but the stalls sell it all year. There are fish stands at the market and inside the Markthal.

Ten minutes south, by the Leuvehaven, stands the city's most moving monument: Ossip Zadkine's De Verwoeste Stad, "The Destroyed City", a 6 m bronze figure with its arms thrown up to the sky and a hole where its heart should be. The department store De Bijenkorf gave it to the city in 1953.

The story behind it: on 14 May 1940, German forces demanded Rotterdam's surrender and threatened to bomb it. Talks were under way when the bombers arrived around 1:27pm. Red flares were fired to call them off, and part of the formation turned back, but the rest dropped their bombs. The fire burned for days. Rotterdam surrendered that evening, and the Netherlands the next day, after Germany threatened Utrecht with the same. After the war the city added a motto to its coat of arms: Sterker door strijd, "Stronger through struggle".

Walk five minutes north to see what came through and what came after: the 1920s Stadhuis on the Coolsingel, which survived the fire, and the Lijnbaan, opened in 1953 as one of Europe's first purpose-built pedestrian shopping streets and the symbol of the new city. A line of lights set into the pavement, the brandgrens, marks where the fire stopped.

Walk down to the river at the foot of the Erasmusbrug, where the Spido boats leave from the Willemsplein for a 75-minute tour of the harbor. Rotterdam is the biggest port in Europe, stretching some 40 km to the sea, and from 1962 to 2004 it was the busiest port in the world. From the water you'll pass shipyards, dry docks, container terminals and huge cranes, the working side of the city that most visitors never see.

For the evening, walk to Witte de Withstraat, the city's favorite street for a night out, lined with bars, galleries and restaurants. On it is Kunstinstituut Melly, a contemporary art center named after an artwork on its facade, and Warung Mini, a Surinamese-Javanese canteen that has been serving roti and fried rice since 1983. It's a good first taste of Rotterdam's mixed food scene. For a drink, Café De Witte Aap is the street's landmark bar.

The main Boijmans Van Beuningen museum, one of the best art museums in the country, has been closed for renovation since 2019 and isn't due to reopen until 2030. In the meantime its collection lives next door in the Depot, opened in 2021: a 40 m mirrored bowl by MVRDV and the world's first art storehouse open to the public.

Inside, more than 151,000 works, from Bosch and Bruegel to Dalí and Rothko, are stored on racks, in cabinets and in glass-walled rooms, with restorers at work behind windows. Glass elevators and crisscrossing staircases go up through a huge atrium to a rooftop birch forest with a view over the city.

At the other end of the Museumpark is the Kunsthal, designed by Rotterdam's most famous architect, Rem Koolhaas, and opened in 1992. It has no permanent collection, just a constantly changing program of exhibitions, around 25 a year, from fashion and photography to design and old masters. The building itself, a box of ramps and odd materials crossed by a road, is a lesson in how Koolhaas thinks. Next door, Het Nieuwe Instituut runs Huis Sonneveld, a 1933 villa with its modernist interior intact, the best of its kind in the country.

From the Kunsthal, walk into Het Park, a 19th-century English-style landscape park with ponds, old trees and lawns that fill up on sunny days. Above it rises the Euromast, which you'll come back to for the view on day five. Walk out of the park's western side along the river towards Delfshaven. On the way you pass the entrance to the Maastunnel, opened in 1942, where you can ride the original wooden escalators down and walk or cycle under the river.

Delfshaven was the harbor of Delft until it became part of Rotterdam in 1886, and because it lay outside the bombed center, its old harbor survived the war: a short canal with old merchant houses, a drawbridge and a windmill, De Distilleerketel, built in 1727 and rebuilt in 1986, which still grinds grain.

It was from here, in late July 1620, that a group of English Puritans who had been living in exile in Leiden said goodbye on the quay and sailed for England on the Speedwell. Tradition says they held a last service in the church by the harbor, though there's no proof of it. They later crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower and became known in America as the Pilgrim Fathers. The church is now called the Pelgrimvaderskerk.

Stay in Delfshaven for dinner at Stadsbrouwerij De Pelgrim, a brewpub in an old building on the quay that brews its own beer on site.

The Delfshaven district is also where Rotterdam's most famous dish was invented. In 2003, a Cape Verdean barber called Nataniël "Tati" Gomes, who died in 2023, asked his local snack bar, El Aviva on the Schiedamseweg, to put everything he liked in one tray: fries, shawarma meat, melted Gouda and salad. They called it the kapsalon, "hair salon", and it spread across the country. It's now on the Dutch list of intangible heritage (see What to Eat and Drink).

Start by walking across the Erasmusbrug, the white cable-stayed bridge by Ben van Berkel that opened in 1996 and quickly became the symbol of the new Rotterdam. Its single bent pylon, 139 m high, earned it the nickname De Zwaan, the Swan. It's 802 m long, and from the middle you get the full skyline: the old city behind you, the towers of the Wilhelminapier in front.

At the end of the pier stands Hotel New York, the old head office of the Holland America Line, built in 1901-17. Hundreds of thousands of emigrants from all over Europe boarded ships for America here, and the building has been a hotel, café and restaurant since 1993. Have coffee or an early lunch in the big hall, which still looks like a shipping office, with the river outside the windows.

Look back upriver for the old green railway lift bridge, De Hef, from 1927, and the Noordereiland below it. Around you rise the towers that gave the area its nickname, Manhattan on the Maas, among them Rem Koolhaas's De Rotterdam (2013), three stacked and shifted blocks that form one of the biggest buildings in the country.

Cross the little bridge to Katendrecht and the old San Francisco warehouse, which reopened in May 2025 as Fenix, a museum of migration, a fitting subject for a building that stood where emigrants waited. The art inside, from photographs to installations, is about leaving home and arriving somewhere new.

The building's star is the Tornado by the Chinese architect Ma Yansong: a double-helix staircase of steel and wood that spirals out of the warehouse and up to a viewing platform on the roof, with a view back across the river to the city.

Ten minutes east, the national photography museum reopened in February 2026 in Pakhuis Santos, a restored coffee warehouse from 1903 on the Rijnhaven. It holds millions of Dutch photographs, from 19th-century plates to famous photojournalism, and the exhibitions mix the historic and the contemporary. The rooftop restaurant has one of the best views of the harbor.

Katendrecht, "De Kaap", was for a century the roughest neighborhood in the city: sailors' bars, a red-light district, and before World War II the largest Chinese community in Europe, made up of stokers and sailors from the ships. Locals from across the river didn't go there. Today it's the opposite, with restaurants and terraces around the Deliplein square.

Have dinner on the Deliplein, then a beer from Kaapse Brouwers, Rotterdam's best-known craft brewery, at its bar in the old Fenix warehouses. If the light is good, take a yellow water taxi back across the river, the way Rotterdammers do. Moored nearby is the SS Rotterdam, the Holland America Line's flagship from 1959, now a hotel you can tour.

Delft is the Dutch town of postcards, small and perfect, with tree-lined canals and a big market square. At one end of the square stands the Nieuwe Kerk, where William of Orange, the father of the Dutch nation, was buried after he was assassinated in Delft in 1584, and where Dutch kings and queens have been buried ever since. Climb its tower, one of the tallest in the country, for the view over the roofs.

He was shot at the Prinsenhof, a former convent a few minutes away that's now the town museum, and the bullet holes are still in the staircase wall. At the other end of the square is the town hall, and a few streets away the Oude Kerk, with its leaning tower and the grave of the painter Johannes Vermeer, who spent his whole life here. The Vermeer Centrum tells his story with copies of all his paintings, since none of the originals are left in Delft.

Delft gave its name to the blue-and-white pottery that Dutch potters started making in the 17th century to copy the Chinese porcelain coming in on the ships. Of the dozens of factories, only Royal Delft, founded in 1653, is left, and it still paints everything by hand. You can tour the workshops and see the painters at work. Have lunch back on the Markt before you take the train.

In The Hague, walk ten minutes from the station to the Mauritshuis, a small 17th-century palace that holds one of the finest collections of Dutch Golden Age painting anywhere: Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring and View of Delft, Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp and Fabritius's Goldfinch. It's intimate, never too big, and you can stand very close.

Next door is the Binnenhof, where the Dutch parliament has met for centuries, on the edge of the Hofvijver pond. It's closed for a long renovation until 2031, so see it from across the water, which is the best view anyway.

Take tram 1 from the center to Scheveningen, The Hague's beach on the North Sea, about 20 minutes away. Walk the long sandy beach and the pier, look at the grand Kurhaus hotel from 1885, and have fish for dinner on the boulevard while the sun sets over the sea. Trains from The Hague get you back to Rotterdam in about 25 minutes.

East of the city, where the rivers Lek and Noord meet, 19 windmills built around 1740 stand in two long rows along the canals of the polder. They were built to pump water out of the low land into the rivers, and together they make the most famous windmill landscape in the world, a UNESCO site since 1997. Two are open as museum mills, where you see how the millers' families lived inside them.

Walk or cycle along the dikes between the mills, and visit the old Wisboom pumping station that replaced them. It's at its most peaceful on the first boat of the morning or late in the afternoon.

Back in the city, take the metro or a tram to the West-Kruiskade, the most multicultural street in Rotterdam, near Centraal station. Suriname was a Dutch colony until 1975, and tens of thousands of Surinamese families settled in Rotterdam, bringing a cuisine that mixes Indian, Javanese, Chinese, African and Creole cooking.

Sranang, a Chinese-Surinamese canteen at the start of the street since 1981, is a classic for a roti with chicken, potato and long beans, or a broodje pom, a sandwich of baked cassava root and chicken (see What to Eat and Drink).

Take a bus or a taxi to the northwest edge of the city for the Van Nelle Factory, built in 1925-31 for a company that processed coffee, tea and tobacco. With its walls of glass, its light and its open floors linked by glass bridges, it was a revolution in factory design, and in 2014 it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Le Corbusier called it the most beautiful spectacle of the modern age.

Today it's full of offices and design studios and hosts events, so you'll mostly see it from outside. Walk along the canal in front for the best view.

End the trip where you can see all of it. The Euromast, built in 1960 for a flower show, has a viewing platform about 100 m up, and in 1970 a slender "Space Tower" was added on top, with the Euroscoop, a glass elevator that turns slowly as it rises to 185 m. From the top you see the whole city, the river and the port stretching away to the sea.

Come up before sunset, watch the city lights come on, and have a farewell dinner in the restaurant at the top, or walk back down through Het Park to the bars of the Scheepvaartkwartier, the old shipping quarter at its foot.