Zaanse Schans or Kinderdijk: Which Windmills Are Worth Your Day

Zaanse Schans Made Things

The Zaan was Western Europe's first industrial region, and at its peak around a thousand windmills worked this river. They were factories: crushing chalk and lapis into paint pigment, pressing linseed for oil, milling mustard seed, sawing the timber that built the Dutch fleet.

Six of the survivors still do it, and you can stand next to the machinery while they do. That is the specific pleasure of the place, and it is why two hours outside the buildings misses the point entirely. Which mill does what, and when each one opens, is set out in the six mills you can go inside.

• De Kat: paint pigment, the last working paint mill anywhere
• Het Jonge Schaap: a 1680 sawmill rebuilt from the original drawings
• De Huisman: mustard and spices since 1786
• De Zoeker and De Bonte Hen: oil pressed from seed, closed in winter

Kinderdijk Moved Water

Kinderdijk never made anything. Its nineteen mills, built around 1740, existed to pump water out of the Alblasserwaard polder and keep the land above the rivers, which is the older and more Dutch problem of the two.

They stand along two straight canals in open country, which is why every photograph of Kinderdijk looks the same and why it still works: nineteen mills in one frame, sails against a huge sky, no shops in the way. Two are open as museum mills. UNESCO listed the site in 1997.

The silence is the attraction. If what you want from Dutch windmills is landscape rather than machinery, Kinderdijk is the better place and it is not close.

Costs and Journeys, Compared

The numbers are what usually settle this, especially from an Amsterdam hotel.

Can You Do Both in One Day?

From Amsterdam, technically yes and practically no. The two sites sit on opposite sides of the country's busiest motorway corridor, roughly two and a half hours apart by public transport, and you would spend five hours travelling to spend ninety minutes at each.

If you have two days and want both, do Zaanse Schans on a morning from Amsterdam and Kinderdijk from Rotterdam on the day you head south. Reaching Kinderdijk from Rotterdam takes about 30 minutes on waterbus line 21 for roughly €4.80, which is the cheapest and most enjoyable approach to any windmill site in the country.

A Day at Each, Hour by Hour

The shape of the two visits differs as much as the mills do. One is a half day with buildings to enter; the other is a walk with a view that changes slowly.

Which Suits Children, and Which Suits Photographers

Children do better at Zaanse Schans. There are animals in the field, clogs being carved, cheese to taste, a pancake restaurant, and buildings to go inside when it rains. Kinderdijk is a long flat walk beside water with two mills to enter, which is a harder sell at eight years old.

Photographers should go to Kinderdijk. Nineteen mills, no shops, no coaches parked in the frame, and low sun across an empty polder in the hour before sunset. At Zaanse Schans the equivalent shot is from the Julianabrug before half past nine, and there is a coach in it by ten.

• Travelling with children: Zaanse Schans, arrive at opening
• Serious about photographs: Kinderdijk, late afternoon, from Rotterdam
• Only one free day in Amsterdam: Zaanse Schans, no contest
• Already going to Rotterdam or Dordrecht: Kinderdijk by waterbus
• Want fishing villages too: a coach tour to the Amsterdam windmills covering up to four stops

The Third Option Nobody Mentions

Amsterdam itself keeps a few mills, and they cost nothing to look at. De Gooyer stands on Funenkade with the Brouwerij 't IJ taproom in the old bathhouse at its foot. Molen van Sloten in the south-west runs guided tours every hour from 10:00 and is the only mill inside the city you can enter. Krijtmolen d'Admiraal, a chalk mill from 1792, sits in Amsterdam-Noord.

None of them replaces a proper windmill site. All three fit into an afternoon on a bicycle, which makes them the right answer when the weather is bad or the day is short.

What Each Place Does Badly

Zaanse Schans is crowded from half past ten and sells a great deal of fridge magnets. It is also compact enough that a busy day feels busy everywhere at once, and the coach car park sits within sight of the mills.

Kinderdijk is remote, charges to enter, and gives you two interiors rather than six. In poor weather it offers almost no shelter, and the walk between the far mills is long enough that families with small children turn back.

Neither problem is hidden. Pick the one whose weakness you mind less.

If You Only Get One Windmill Day, Read This

Most visitors to the Netherlands get exactly one. Spend it at Zaanse Schans if you are sleeping in Amsterdam, because the maths is brutal: 34 minutes of travel in total against three hours, for a site where six buildings open instead of two.

Spend it at Kinderdijk if you are sleeping anywhere south of Gouda, or if what you actually want is the photograph everyone has seen, with nineteen mills receding down a canal and nothing man-made in the frame except the mills.

The practical detail that decides it for a lot of people is the early start. Zaanse Schans rewards being there at nine, which is easy from an Amsterdam hotel and impossible from one in Rotterdam. How to get there and what it costs covers the trains, and the ticket structure explains why the free village still ends up costing €15 if you want to go inside more than one mill.