Volendam, year round
Cheese, costume and the villages north of Amsterdam
A stop in a cheese shop where the traditional costume is still worn behind the counter, and what else the village day is made of.
The excursion north of Amsterdam is the one visitors picture when they picture the Netherlands: windmills, a harbour, a wheel of cheese and a pair of wooden shoes. All of it is real, and all of it is closer to the city than people expect. Zaanse Schans is twenty minutes out. Volendam is half an hour.
Zaanse Schans is an industrial site, not a village
This is the part that surprises people. The Zaan region was one of the largest industrial areas in seventeenth century Europe, with hundreds of windmills sawing timber, grinding pigment and pressing oil. What stands at Zaanse Schans today is a collection of buildings brought together from around the region, and the mills that turn there still do real work. The paint mill grinds pigment. The sawmill saws.
The clog demonstration takes ten minutes and answers a question everyone has: why wood. The answer is that a wet field will destroy leather in a season, and a clog can be hollowed out of a single block of willow in a few minutes and floats when the field floods.
The cheese stop
The cheese farm demonstration is short and the tasting board that follows it is the real point. Dutch cheese is graded by age: jong at four weeks, belegen at four months, oud at a year and over. Most visitors arrive assuming they like the young one and leave buying the old one, which crunches with salt crystals and tastes nothing like the mild yellow slices sold abroad as gouda.
In Volendam the traditional costume is still worn behind some counters, not as a performance but because that is what the shop has always looked like. The photo studios on the harbour are a separate thing entirely, and they have been dressing visitors in lace caps since well before the tour bus arrived.
Edam, Volendam and Marken are three different places
- Edam is the quiet one, with the cheese name, a weighing house and canals nobody photographs enough.
- Volendam is the harbour: an eel smokehouse, a fish stall, a sea wall to walk along, and the busiest hour of the day between noon and one.
- Marken was an island until a causeway reached it in 1957. The wooden houses stand on mounds and posts because the water used to come in, and the crossing by boat from Volendam is the better way to arrive.
All four can be done in a full day with lunch. Half a day means choosing two of them, and the pairing that disappoints least is Zaanse Schans plus Volendam and Marken.
