Amsterdam is unique in its mix of grachts and straats (canals and streets), in its canalscape of ornately gabled warehouses and delicately arched brick bridges, with clanging trams above and purring riverboats below.
Equally, it's famous for its easy-going attitudes to soft drugs and prostitution, in a red light area which is invariably thronged with tourists. But many visitors come here for its treasures of art, as displayed in the Van Gogh Museum and the Rijksmuseum, filled with the likes of Rembrandt and Vermeer.
The landscapes celebrated by those Old Masters are still out there beyond the city limits: polders and dykes, tulip fields and dairy herds, canal-side windmills and trees in marching rows. And then there are the often-overlooked small towns like Middleburg, its centre a forest of gables and masts, most of them immaculate, but hundreds of years old.
Print >