Welcome, fellow adventurers, to the Zaanstad City Tour! Just north of Amsterdam, along a lazy bend of the river Zaan, stands the single most photographed row of windmills on Earth: the Zaanse Schans. Its tarry-green wooden houses, tilting warehouses and turning sails have appeared on postcards, chocolate wrappers and Delft Blue tiles for generations, but almost nothing you're about to see was actually built here. Between 1961 and 1974, historians raced to save the finest windmills, merchant houses and workshops of the wider Zaanstreek region from demolition and modernization, hauling them plank by plank onto barges and rebuilding them along this dike — creating, essentially, the world's first rescue village. That rescue mattered because the Zaanstreek wasn't just picturesque, it was revolutionary. In 1594 a local carpenter named Cornelis Corneliszoon van Uitgeest patented a wind-driven crankshaft that turned round-and-round sail power into the straight back-and-forth motion needed to saw timber, and the region exploded: at its 17th- and 18th-century peak, somewhere between 600 and 1,000 windmills churned along the Zaan, sawing wood, pressing oil, grinding pigment, milling mustard and snuff, and making paper — historians now call it the world's first industrialized landscape, running two centuries before steam engines existed. Walk with us past the mills, the cheese farm, the clog carvers and the humble little shop where one of the world's biggest supermarket chains began, answer each stop's question to earn a letter, and see if you can spell out exactly what the Zaanstreek pioneered.

Windmills, Wooden Villages & the World's First Industry

Zaanstad City Tour

9 stops · 165 min · 2.2 km

€ 14,99€ 9,99

Instant access after payment — you'll get a code by email and on screen to unlock the tour.