Leiden; Saturday, 06 August, 2022

I had an early breakfast and was out of the hotel and back in the centre of town in time to catch the first canal tour of the morning from one of the many companies providing such services. This particular company uses the type of canal ships familiar to Amsterdam, which meant that for a lot of it’s route it stuck to the main outer waterways of the canal system, being too large to manoeuvre into some of the smaller canals.

Back in the city centre I had a bit of a wander around, taking in the Rembrandt Bridge and the site of the painter’s dad’s former wind mill – now recreated on the same spot. I then found myself at another of the companies offering canal tours, this one in more Leiden traditional open barges so I booked onto their tour, as well as booking for a night time tour later that evening. This turned out to be a good idea, as with a smaller boat the tour was able to go down several different canals to the earlier tour, meaning I got to see much more of the city centre than I would have done if I’d just stuck to the original tour.

After finishing the tour I headed back through town and grabbed a quick bite to eat before popping in to visit a couple of the large churches in the centre of town, the Catholic Hartebrugkerk and nearby the Marekerk, famous for being one of the first purpose built Protestant churches in the country following the reformation.

From there it was a short walk over to the Lammermakrt and the site of the De Valk Windmill. Originally this had been one of many mills dotted over the city, but today it’s the only remaining original windmill in the centre and is today both a monument and a museum, which shows how those working in mills would have lived and worked. As well as an informative film on the importance of the windmill to the history of the Dutch.

From the viewing platform at 14m up the mill there were excellent views over the city, and I did briefly consider continuing up to the window at the 29m top part of the mill, but then saw how steep the only stairs up (and more importantly down) were and decided that was a climb too far. The 6 flights of steep stairs having to go down backwards to get back down to ground level from 14m were bad enough!

From the Windmill I headed over towards the western side of the city and visited the Morspoort, one of only two remaining gates of the city, that were once part of the walls that, built up against the outer canals, helped protect the city.

From the Morspoort I wandered through the city centre, stopping off at the massive Hooglandse Kerk, which is now 25% church, 75% exhibition space – the building being too large for the size of modern Dutch congregations – before heading on to the Zijlpoort, the other remining gate of the city over on the Eastern side of the city centre.

I stopped for a late afternoon drink in a café near the Zjilpoort before heading back to the hotel via a supermarket to pick up some food for a quick hotel picnic dinner.

After dinner I headed back over to the canal tour company to join the evening tour round the canals of the city. There were only four of us of the tour (three tourists and the captain), so we used a small boat, which meant we were able to travel down some of the even smaller canals in the city centre and see even more of the network. The tour set off at 21:30 with the last of the sunlight just starting to disappear from the sky, so by the time we headed up the most stunning part of the tour, the final leg up the New Rhein past the city hall and under the Corn and Fish bridges the city was lit up in floodlights against a night sky.

Back at the landing stage it was time to wander back to the hotel, but I took a detour so that I went over the Rembrandt Bridge and past the Morspoort to take some photos at night, before getting back to the hotel for a well-earned nights sleep.