Half-Day Walks in the Netherlands

Thomas à Kempis wrote The Imitation of Christ in a monastery outside Zwolle around 1418. It became the most translated book in Western literature after the Bible.

Mata Hari — dancer, spy, and the most famous woman executed in WWI — was born Margaretha Zelle on a quiet street in Leeuwarden in 1876. The building is now a shoe shop.

Of the 10,000 British paratroopers who dropped near Arnhem in September 1944, fewer than 2,500 returned. The John Frost Bridge they fought to hold still stands over the Rhine.

In 1572 Spanish troops killed every inhabitant of Naarden under a white flag of truce. The rebuilt fortress (1685) became Europe's model star fort — and is still completely intact today.

When the Afsluitdijk closed the Zuiderzee in 1932, Enkhuizen's herring industry collapsed within two years. The town today has fewer inhabitants than it had in 1650.

Willem Schouten, born in Hoorn, was the first navigator to round the southern tip of South America in 1616. He named it Cape Horn after his home city — which is why every sailor who rounds the cape honors a small Dutch harbor town.

Dordrecht received the oldest city charter in Holland in 1220 — before Amsterdam, Leiden, or Haarlem. Painter Aelbert Cuyp was born here and never left; the golden light in his river scenes is the real afternoon light over these waters.

The Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk was destroyed when a merchant illegally stored gunpowder in the crypt and it exploded in 1787 — the tower survived and has stood alone ever since. Mondrian grew up looking at these canals before inventing his grids.

Kampen's Nieuwe Toren (1664) started leaning within a generation of being built — soft peat under the foundations compressed unevenly. Nobody has corrected it. Three of the city's medieval gate towers still stand in their original positions, which almost no other Dutch city can claim.