Den Helder Netherlands North Holland
Frequently Asked Questions
In the port, within walking distance of the historic Willemsoord quarter, at the very tip of North Holland between the North Sea and the Wadden Sea.
The former naval yard built in the early nineteenth century to maintain the royal fleet. It has kept its basins, dry docks and brick workshops, but the craftsmen have given way to cafés, museums and heritage ships.
The museum tracing four centuries of Dutch naval history, with an attraction few museums can match: the Tonijn, a 1960s submarine set on dry land, can be toured from bow to stern.
Yes, the national Dorus Rijkers museum, which tells of the lifeboats that went out into storms to find the shipwrecked. The Dutch have a relationship with the sea of struggle and gratitude that this place sums up well.
Yes, the ferry leaves from the neighbouring harbour and the crossing takes only twenty minutes. Just check the return times: margin is everything on a port call.
Hire a bike at the landing and ride through dunes, endless beaches, brick villages and fields dotted with sheep, out to the red lighthouse at the island's tip. Seafood in tiny harbours and farm cheeses round out the day.
A Napoleonic-era bastion honeycombed with galleries toured with a guide, marine aquarium included. Napoleon, who had the position fortified, is said to have seen this maritime lock as a Gibraltar of the North.
One of the tallest lighthouses in the Netherlands, in red cast iron, crowning the Huisduinen dunes near Den Helder.
By bicycle. Everything is flat and signposted, and swept by a wind that is part of the local character.
Not in the sense of Amsterdam's gilded gables and canals. Its modest streets, rebuilt after the destruction of the Second World War, tell of a community organised around the navy, sea rescue and the sea — and that is what makes the stop instructive.
