Things to do at Zaanse Schans

The most industrialised place on earth, once

It is worth knowing what you are looking at, because the postcard version — quaint Dutch windmills on a green bank — has it almost exactly backwards.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the banks of the Zaan carried something like six hundred industrial windmills, the densest concentration of machine power anywhere in the world before coal. They sawed timber for the ships that built the Dutch empire, crushed linseed for oil, ground pigment, mustard, tobacco and cocoa. This was a factory district. The green wooden houses were worker housing, and the paint on them was cheap because it was made two hundred metres away.

Almost all of it went. By 1900 steam had won, and the mills were pulled down for their timber. The dozen or so standing today at Zaanse Schans are survivors that were physically moved here, mostly between 1961 and 1974, from sites along the river where they would otherwise have been demolished.

What actually decides whether you enjoy it

Not the weather. The time you arrive.

Zaanse Schans is compact — you can walk the whole site in twenty minutes — and it receives well over a million visitors a year, most of them delivered by coach between mid-morning and mid-afternoon. At eleven o’clock in July the path along the riverside is a queue. At nine it is a village with a heron on the bank.

There is no trick to this beyond going early or going late. The site itself is open ground with no gate and no opening hour; it is the mills, the museum and the shops that keep hours. An hour before the businesses open is a perfectly good hour to be there, and it is the only way to photograph the row of mills without somebody else’s group in the frame.

Pairing it with something else

Because it is small and close, Zaanse Schans works badly as a whole day and very well as half of one. The obvious second half is the old fishing coast on the IJsselmeer — Volendam, Marken, Monnickendam — which is twenty-five minutes east and a completely different landscape: water, dykes and harbours rather than industry and timber.

If you would rather stay put, Zaandam town centre is five minutes away and worth a look for one strange thing: the Inntel hotel, a stack of about seventy Zaan house facades piled seventy metres into the air. It divides people sharply, which is the point of it.