If you’re looking for a way to get out of the city when visiting Amsterdam, I highly recommend going to Zaanse Schans!
What is Zaanse Schans
Zaanse Schans is an open air conservation area and neighborhood in the town Zaandam. I say conservation area, rather than open air museum, because there are still individuals living in the homes there. It’s mostly known for their collection of windmills, but it is also a great place to learn about traditional Dutch heritage.
The ten windmills, as well as some of the wooden houses, were relocated to Zaanse Schans as part of a preservation effort in the 60s and 70s. In addition to the windmills, the location also has a clog workshop, a museum, a pancake restaurant, and a cheese factory (my personal favorite). The windmills are the real attraction though, and represent a variety of mill functions: sawing wood, grinding spices, pressing oil, and grinding pigments for dyes!
Tickets are €30 per adult, but the conservation area itself is free, so the decision of whether or not to pay for a ticket depends on what activities interest you most!
Overall, I’d plan to spend about two to three hours hitting all the attractions, so it’s best to do Zaanse Schans as a day trip or half day trip from Amsterdam, rather than staying directly in Zaandam.
What To Do at Zaanse Schans
- Check out the Windmills: With a ticket, you’re able to enter some, but not all, of the windmills. Seasons dictate which windmills are open, but you’re sure to learn a ton from whichever windmills you enter!
- Personally, we didn’t go inside any of the windmills and still had a great experience.
- If you don’t want to pay the full ticket price, many of the windmills will sell tickets individually for about €6 apiece.
- Sample Cheese at the Catharina Hoeve Cheese Farm: Henri Willig (one of the more well known Dutch cheese brands) has one of their farms located at Zaanse Schans. Here you can watch a cheese making demonstration, as well as sample a huge variety of cheeses in their back store, all for free!
- I recommend trying every single cheese. Potentially twice.
- Enjoy the Fresh Air: The best part about Zaanse Schans, in my opinion, is wandering through the wooden houses and the paved walking paths, enjoying the fresh air and the beautiful views.
- Eat Lunch at the Pancake House: De Kraii offers a convenient and delicious lunch on site! I’d recommend going for a classic pancake (29 centimeters in diameter!) but the restaurant also serves sandwiches, soups, and other bakery items.
- Other activities and sites include a clog making workshop (free!), a bakery museum (free!), cultural and windmill focused museums, and more!
How to Get There:
There are lots of different ways to get to Zaanse Schans.
- There’s a train from Centraal Station in Amsterdam. It takes ~20 minutes to arrive at the Zaandijk – Zaanse Schans stop. From the stop, it’s about a 15-minute walk to the entrance.
- The 800/801 buses will also take you there from Centraal Station in Amsterdam. These buses leave about every 15 minutes and drop off very close to the entrance.
- Finally, you can take an organized tour.
- If you know me you know I usually don’t like an organized tour, unless it provides transportation to a hard-to-reach location, which really isn’t necessary for Zaanse Schans.
While I don’t recommend a tour to just see Zaanse Schans, I do ABSOLUTELY recommend doing an e-bike tour that takes you through the Dutch countryside, including a visit to Zaanse Schans!
The E-Bike Tour You Should Book Immediately
Our tour was through a company called “Those Amsterdames” and can be booked through their website or through Airbnb. The total tour was 5.5 hours and covered 25-30 miles of cycling, made accessible to all by the e-bike!
Our tour met on the north side of Amsterdam, in the Red Light District, in the morning. From there we cycled through the streets to the ferry that took us across the river. Once we exited the ferry on the North side, we almost immediately felt like we were in the Dutch countryside. It was a great way to get outside of the city experience. Plus, cycling is such a large part of Dutch culture, so it wouldn’t have felt right leaving the area without getting on a bike.
Outside of seeing Zaanse Schans, some of the other highlights from our tour included:
- Getting to bike through a range of fields and towns, all on designated bike paths!
- A large perk was not needing to figure out our own map or route, which wound around quite a bit, and would have been tough to replicate on our own.
- Our tour guide sharing additional history about Amsterdam, including some cool World War 2 facts.
- Stops at two additional windmills, one of which was a water windmill currently lived in and operated by a man named Marcel. Marcel was kind enough to walk through all the different mechanisms of the mill, and even let us climb up onto one of the blades.
- An extra stop at the iconic Zaandam Inntel hotel (a hotel made up ~70 individual traditional Zaan houses!)
Overall, I absolutely loved our tour and would recommend it to all, but there’s no wrong way to visit Zaanse Schans, as long as you have fun 🙂