Rotterdam
The one Dutch city that doesn't apologise for having no old town
- When to go
- October 13° · 16 rainy days
- Per day
- €€€€price 4 of 5
- How many days
- 1–2days
- For you
- 6 questions →
- Nearest airport
- 5 km Rotterdam · 47 km Amsterdam
- Right now
Rotterdam has no medieval centre because on 14 May 1940 the German bombing and the fire that followed wiped it out: nearly twenty-five thousand homes were lost and eighty-five thousand people were left without a roof. After the war the city wasn't put back the way it had been — it was continued forwards, and you see that on every street.
The decision not to rebuild is what makes Rotterdam unlike anywhere else in the country. Instead of gabled houses along a canal you get cube houses tilted 54.7 degrees, a market hall with eleven thousand square metres of painting on its ceiling, and a bridge the locals call the Swan. Walking the centre feels like touring an architecture exhibition at full scale, and all of it fits inside a twenty-minute walk around Blaak station.
The port is the other reason to come. Rotterdam's port is the largest in Europe, and from 1962 to 2004 it was the largest in the world. What you see from the city is its oldest part: the docks moved steadily downriver to the west, so the biggest container terminals now sit on the reclaimed land of the Maasvlakte, right on the North Sea, tens of kilometres from the centre.
Guides for Rotterdam
Shorter, practical pages for one concrete question each — how many days, how much money, where to sleep, where to escape the city.
Where to stay in Rotterdam
→In Rotterdam you do not choose a room by its distance from a canal but by its view of a city built after the war.
What to see in Rotterdam
The Cube Houses
Thirty-eight small cubes and two large ones by Piet Blom, set on hexagonal pillars and tilted 54.7 degrees so that you look down at the street through the windows. One of them, the Kijk-Kubus, is furnished and open to visitors — enough to show you why the furniture had to be custom-made.
The Markthal
A horseshoe of 228 apartments arched over a food market, opened on 1 October 2014 to a design by MVRDV. The ceiling is eleven thousand square metres of painting — the Horn of Plenty by Arno Coenen and Iris Roskam. Entry is free, and the market runs underneath.
The Erasmus Bridge
Opened in 1996, 802 metres long, with a 139-metre pylon that earned it the nickname the Swan. It takes about ten minutes to walk and gives the best view of the skyline — especially in the evening, from the south bank.
Delfshaven
The old harbour the 1940 bombing passed by: a canal of gabled houses and a windmill, the city as it was before the war. The Pilgrims sailed from here in 1620 on their way to America. The metro stops at Delfshaven station, a few stops west of the centre.
Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen
A mirrored bowl of a building where the museum's entire store is on show rather than a curated selection — by the museum's own account the world's first publicly accessible art depot, opened in 2021. The main museum building has been closed for renovation since 2019, so for now this is where the collection is seen. The roof is a green terrace with a view over the city.
The port by boat
Spido's 75-minute loop leaves from Willemsplein, at the foot of the Erasmus Bridge: two-thirds city, one-third port — the RDM shipyard and the Waalhaven. It doesn't reach the Maasvlakte terminals; those have a separate trip of their own. If you only have half an hour, go up the Euromast instead.
Two things you probably did not know
On 14 May 1940 Rotterdam lost its entire centre to half an hour of bombing. That is why it is the only large Dutch city without an old core. It is also why the city became a testing ground for modern architecture after the war.
The cube houses by the architect Piet Blom are tilted at 45 degrees and stand on pillars. They were conceived as trees forming a wood above the street; one of them is a museum, so you can see how living in a tilted room actually works.
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