Netherlands

Discover Netherlands

Fun Foods

Bitterballen, Raw herring, Fries with mayo, Hagelslag, Stroopwafel, Poffertjes, Bitterballen

In 1637, a single tulip bulb could sell for more than a skilled craftsman earned in an entire year.

Dutch traders had become so obsessed with rare tulips that prices spun completely out of control, and people paid small fortunes for a single bulb. Historians call it "Tulip Mania," the first financial bubble in recorded history.

The wild part? Tulips weren't even Dutch. They came from Turkey.

Here's something even stranger about this country. About a quarter of the Netherlands sits below sea level. Without constant human effort, large parts of it would simply be underwater.

So the Dutch built windmills to pump water off the land, drained entire lakes, and created new farmland called "polders," slowly turning the sea floor into places where people could live and grow food.

That same drive pushed the Netherlands to become one of the richest places on earth by the 1600s. Dutch merchants created the world's first publicly traded company, the Dutch East India Company, and invented the modern stock market.

Amsterdam became a global center of art, money, and ideas. Rembrandt painted here. Vermeer painted 40 miles south in Delft.

Then World War II arrived. Germany occupied the Netherlands in 1940 and began rounding up Jewish families.

A teenage girl named Anne Frank hid with her family for over two years inside a secret apartment in Amsterdam, reached through a door hidden behind a revolving bookcase. She kept a diary the whole time, and it became one of the most read books in the world.

Start your visit at the Anne Frank House, then walk to the Rijksmuseum to see actual Rembrandt paintings. In spring, take a train to Keukenhof, where seven million flowers bloom across 80 acres.

Grab a warm stroopwafel from a street cart. Try raw herring with onions the way locals eat it. And make time for Rotterdam, where Germany bombed the historic city center flat in 1940 and the Dutch rebuilt it into one of the boldest modern skylines in Europe.