Photo: Massimo Catarinella (CC BY 3.0, resized)
Things to do in Rotterdam
Rotterdam is the one Dutch city that does not look Dutch. The old centre was destroyed in a single afternoon in 1940, and what went up instead is the best modern architecture in the country.
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Why Rotterdam looks the way it does
On 14 May 1940 the German air force bombed the centre of Rotterdam and it burned. Roughly a square mile of the old city went, including almost everything medieval. The city made a decision afterwards that no other Dutch city made: it did not reconstruct what had been lost. It built something new instead, and then kept doing that for eighty years.
The result is the only skyline in the Netherlands, a habit of putting up buildings that argue with each other, and a city that feels much younger than it is. If you have spent three days on Amsterdam’s canals, Rotterdam is the correction.
Getting your bearings
Almost everything on this page sits on a rough diagonal from Blaak in the middle — the Markthal and the Cube Houses — down to the Erasmus Bridge and across the water to the Wilhelminapier. That stretch is walkable end to end in half an hour.
The two exceptions are Delfshaven, west of the centre, and the Euromast, south- west near the park. Both are worth the detour and both are awkward on foot, which is where a car earns its keep.
Half an hour further east is Kinderdijk, where nineteen eighteenth-century windmills stand in a row along the polder dykes. It is UNESCO-listed and it is the opposite of everything Rotterdam is about, which is exactly why the two go well together in one day.
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The Markthal
A horseshoe of apartments arched over a covered food market, with the inside of the arch painted end to end — forty metres of fruit, flowers and fish blown up to a scale that makes people stop in the doorway. Opened in 2014.
기사의 한마디: Look up first, then eat. Almost everyone does it the other way round and misses the ceiling entirely.
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The Cube Houses
Thirty-eight yellow houses tipped onto one corner and stood on concrete stalks, designed by Piet Blom in the early eighties as a forest of abstract trees over a pedestrian street. One is fitted out as a show house you can walk through.
기사의 한마디: They are directly beside the Markthal at Blaak. Doing both together costs you nothing but the walk across the square.
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Delfshaven
A pocket of seventeenth-century Rotterdam that the bombing missed — brick warehouses, a canal, a working windmill. The Pilgrim Fathers sailed from here in 1620 before picking up the Mayflower in England.
기사의 한마디: This is the answer to "where is the old Rotterdam?", and most visitors never get told it exists.
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The Erasmus Bridge and the Wilhelminapier
A 800-metre white cable-stayed bridge the city nicknamed the Swan, and the pier of towers on the far side. Hotel New York at the end of it was the head office of the Holland America Line, where hundreds of thousands of emigrants started the crossing to America.
기사의 한마디: Cross on foot, not by car. It takes about ten minutes and the view back at the skyline is the reason people photograph this city.
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Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen
A mirrored bowl in the middle of the museum park holding the entire Boijmans collection — the first art store in the world built to be walked through rather than hidden. You see the racks, the crates and the conservation work, not a curated hang.
기사의 한마디: The roof terrace is the quietest good view in Rotterdam. The main Boijmans building next door has been shut for renovation, so do not plan around it.
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The Euromast
A 185-metre observation tower left over from the 1960 Floriade, with a rotating lift running up the top section. On a clear day you can see as far as the coast and, in the other direction, the port working.
기사의 한마디: Go up here rather than up a building. The port is the thing worth seeing from height, and you cannot see it from the centre.
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Why does Rotterdam look so different from the rest of the Netherlands?
The centre was flattened by bombing on 14 May 1940 and burned for days. Almost nothing medieval survived, so the city rebuilt from scratch and kept on rebuilding — which is why it is full of architecture from every decade since, rather than canal houses.
How long do I need in Rotterdam?
The Markthal, the Cube Houses, the Erasmus Bridge and Delfshaven fit into a day without rushing. They are strung along a rough line, so the walking is manageable and a car only helps at the two ends.
Is Kinderdijk close to Rotterdam?
Yes — the nineteen UNESCO-listed windmills at Kinderdijk are about half an hour east of the city, and they are the closest thing to a picture-book Dutch landscape anywhere near Rotterdam.
Can you drive us to Rotterdam?
We run a fixed-price transfer between Schiphol and Rotterdam, shown below. For anything else, message us on WhatsApp with what you have in mind and we will tell you the price before you commit to anything.