Kinderdijk is a small village in the province of South Holland near Rotterdam. This UNESCO World Heritage has 19 wind mills. We went there on a summer day from Rotterdam. Living in the Netherlands myzelf, I was a bit ashamed I had never been here!
To Kinderdijk
As said, we went there from Rotterdam. For less than 4 euros (one way) you can travel directly from the Erasmus Bridge Rotterdam to Kinderdijk in half an hour with the “waterbus” (a ferry). You can take your bike with you for free and you can sit inside or outside on the boat itself.
It is also possible to come to Kinderdijk with the waterbus from the city Dordrecht. And there are also several buses going to Kinderdijk from different directions.
Also many bicycle routes in the area will navigate you to or via Kinderdijk.
Of course you can also get there by car, but Kinderdijk itself is car-free.
In Kinderdijk
19 windmills can be seen in Kinderdijk. You can already see a lot of them from the dike, but you can also sail, walk or cycle between them.
We chose the latter.
We determined a route on the cycling junction board and cycled a nice trip to and from Kinderdijk.
Between junction 43 and 18 (about 20 minutes by bike) we came across a very nice restaurant with a nice big terrace. It’s called “the cat in the willow”.
If you do not have a bicycle with you and don’t feel like renting one, you can also walk around the area or plan a route through walking junctions. (There is a bord on the dike just when you come off the waterbus).
If you want to limit yourself to Kinderdijk itself (or combined with cycling or walking), there are for example 3 mills open as a museum and there is a workplace relating to the windmills.
You can also book a cruise and sail between the mills for about half an hour.
Furthermore
- If you travel with the waterbus, pay close attention to the departure times. In our case, the bus only ran once every two hours and the last fare back to Rotterdam was around 4 pm;
- There are only restaurants at the start of Kinderdijk. If you go for a walk through Kinderdijk, you will not cross restaurants after the start;
- Although I have no experience with the ticket, there is a package ticket available. You can purchase the ticket at this site and then have access to audio tours, a film, museum mills and you can join the cruise.
We had a wonderful day. We arrived in Kinderdijk around 10AM and left around 4PM.
We were lucky with the beautiful weather and cycled through the polders, had lunch on the way and ended our day on a terrace.