Walking Tours in Volendam

Volendam: Costume, Canvas, and Song

Nobody planned for Volendam to be famous. In 1357 a dam turned a redundant harbour into reclaimed land; fishermen settled, stayed stubbornly Catholic in a Protestant province, kept wearing their costumes long after their neighbours had stopped, and let foreign painters sleep cheap in exchange for canvases. Those canvases spread around the world and made the image of 'Holland' — a woman in a white winged bonnet, fishing boats behind her — out of one small village on the Zuiderzee. Ten stops through the harbour promenade, the artists' hotel, the church that needed three petitions and a community work-to-rule to get built, and the streets that produced more Dutch pop hits per capita than almost anywhere else on earth.