These are not cities. They are small towns, most of them under 30,000 people, where an afternoon is enough and where you will often be one of very few visitors. If you want Amsterdam, Rotterdam and the rest, see the Dutch cities worth a day instead. This page is for deciding which small town suits you, and each one has a full guide behind it.
Where fishing traditions survived
Spakenburg
The most striking of the group. Spakenburg was a Zuiderzee fishing harbour until the Afsluitdijk cut it off from the sea, and it is one of the very few places in the Netherlands where traditional dress is still worn rather than performed for visitors. The old harbour and the wooden shipyards are the reason to come.
Staphorst
A ribbon village that runs for kilometres along a single road, lined with green and white painted farmhouses. Staphorst is a conservative Protestant community and it feels genuinely unlike the rest of the country. Go on a weekday, and be discreet with your camera.
Golden Age harbours
Enkhuizen
One of the harbours that made the Dutch East India Company rich, now a quiet town with a working marina and the open-air Zuiderzee Museum, which reconstructs the villages that the closing of the Zuiderzee ended. The best single stop on this list if you want history explained rather than implied.
Zwolle
The largest town here and the only one that feels like a small city. A star shaped moat still rings the centre, and the medieval Sassenpoort gate survives intact. Good bookshops, good cafés, and almost no tour groups.
Water and open country
Giethoorn
The famous one. Canals instead of streets in the old centre, footbridges between the houses, and boats rather than cars. It is genuinely lovely and genuinely busy, so go early or late in the day and out of high summer if you can.
Meppel
A compact market town on the edge of Drenthe, with canals through the middle and a weekly market. Nobody visits Meppel as a destination, which is exactly its appeal as a stop on the way north.
Zundert
Vincent van Gogh was born here, and the village makes rather less noise about it than you would expect. Zundert is also known for its flower parade, built from dahlias on a scale that has to be seen to be believed.
If you want the coast instead
Noordwijk and Scheveningen are seaside resorts rather than historic towns, so they are not on this list, but both make an easy day out. See Noordwijk and Scheveningen beach.
Fitting them into a trip
None of these towns needs a full day, and most of them are an hour or less from the middle of the country, which makes them ideal filler between the bigger sights. If you are planning a trip around one base rather than moving hotels, see staying in the center of the Netherlands, or browse the wider list of Netherlands tourist attractions.
