Gouda Netherlands South Holland
8
Cruises availables
At departure or passage at this port
Frequently Asked Questions
River vessels tie up a few minutes' walk from the old heart. You reach the centre on foot along canals lined with narrow façades; the town is entirely flat and everything sits within a one-kilometre radius.
No. The town first grew in the Middle Ages on beer and cloth, and it invented the stroopwafel — the thin syrup-filled waffle — around 1810. The caramel smell drifting through the streets comes from those, not from the cheese wheels.
The market square with its fifteenth-century Gothic town hall standing alone in the middle like a stone ship, and the Sint-Janskerk with its seventy-two sixteenth-century stained-glass windows. Those two stops alone justify the call.
They are the Goudse Glazen, seventy-two windows made largely in the sixteenth century and spared by both wars and iconoclasts. They rank among the best-preserved stained-glass ensembles in Europe. Allow about an hour.
Thursday mornings only, from April to the end of August. Carts, stacked golden wheels, costumed carriers and handshakes sealing the deals the old way. The rest of the week the square belongs to terraces and cyclists.
Yes, easily. Cheese shops in the centre offer tastings from young and creamy to old and crystalline, and the Gouda Cheese Experience explains the making of it interactively. The tradition is not confined to Thursday morning.
The seventeenth-century public weigh house, facing the town hall on the main square. Every cheese wheel was weighed there before sale — a ritual the summer market still revives.
Yes, and it takes very little. Step two streets away from the shopping axes and you find silent courtyards, former almshouses with tended gardens and bridges to watch the barges from. It is in these margins that the town is at its most appealing.
Vacuum-sealed cheese wheels and boxes of syrup waffles, sold throughout the centre. Candles, another local speciality, are also widely available: each December the town lights thousands of them in its windows for a night-time festival.
Yes. Distances are short, the town is flat, freshly pressed waffles win everyone over, and the interactive cheese demonstration holds children's attention. The stained glass, on the other hand, mostly speaks to adults.
