Enkhuizen

Enkhuizen made its fortune on the Zuiderzee and lost everything when the sea was drained. What’s left is one of the most beautiful small harbors in the Netherlands, a world-class open-air museum, and a town that still doesn’t quite believe what happened to it.

The Dromedaris — Enkhuizen's 1540 harbor tower, still watching the water

The City in 60 Seconds

In the 17th century, Enkhuizen was one of the six chambers of the VOC (Dutch East India Company) and one of the wealthiest cities in the Northern Netherlands. Ships left the harbor for the Spice Islands; herring fleets worked the North Sea; the Waag weighed cargoes from across the trading world. At its peak, Enkhuizen had a larger population than it does today.

Then the Zuiderzee — the shallow inland sea on which the whole economy depended — was closed off. The Afsluitdijk, completed in 1932, transformed the saltwater bay into a freshwater lake (the IJsselmeer). The fishing industry collapsed almost immediately. The herring were gone. The sea route to Amsterdam was gone. The town shrank, the warehouses emptied, and the population fell by a third. What was left is what you see today: a harbor ringed with 17th-century buildings and almost nothing built after 1750 that matters.

The Zuiderzee Museum, opened in 1983, reconstructed the fishing villages and trades of the pre-dam Zuiderzee on the shore just outside the old town. It is one of the best open-air museums in Europe — not a theme park, but a genuine attempt to preserve a way of life that vanished within living memory.

Route

1. Dromedaris & the Outer Harbor

Time here: 30 minutes

The Dromedaris is the 1540 harbor tower that marks the entrance to Enkhuizen’s old inner harbor — a six-story octagonal brick tower with a distinctive stepped top and a small wooden bell tower above. It’s been the most painted, most photographed building in Enkhuizen for 400 years, which means you’ve probably seen it without knowing it was here.

Walk around the base of the tower to the outer harbor (Buitenhaven). From the harbor wall, the view looking back at the Dromedaris with the sailboats in the foreground is the one that appears on every tourist brochure about North Holland from 1890 onward — and it still looks exactly like that. The harbor is still working, with fishing boats and traditional sailing craft moored alongside pleasure yachts.

Don’t miss: The inscription over the Dromedaris’s main gate, dating from 1540, and the original iron rings set into the harbor wall for tying up ships — worn smooth by 500 years of rope.

Practical tip: You can climb the Dromedaris tower during summer season (check local opening hours; typically weekends and July/August). The view from the top gives the best sense of the harbor’s shape and the IJsselmeer beyond.

Walk to stop 2: From the Dromedaris, walk along the Dijk (the main harbor road) heading east toward the Zuiderzee Museum entrance, about 8 minutes.

2. Zuiderzee Museum — Indoor Section (Binnenmuseum)

Time here: 45 minutes

The indoor museum occupies the Peperhuis, a spectacular 1625 VOC warehouse — one of the finest merchant warehouse buildings surviving in the Netherlands. Seven connected warehouses with a central courtyard, red shutters, and a clock tower form a building that is itself the most important object in the collection.

Inside, the museum tells the story of the Zuiderzee fishing communities, the VOC, and the transformation of Dutch water management. The ships’ room holds original fishing vessels — the flat-bottomed botter fishing boats designed specifically for the shallow Zuiderzee, with their distinctive rounded hulls and retractable centerboards. The room dedicated to the 1932 closure of the Zuiderzee is the most affecting part of the indoor museum: photographs of fishermen watching their harbor become a lake, of boats beached in a sea that was no longer there.

Don’t miss: The Peperhuis courtyard, visible from the main hall. The proportions of this 1625 warehouse complex — the brick arches, the wooden doors wide enough for cargo bales, the iron hoisting hooks — are the real thing, not a reconstruction.

Practical tip: Combined ticket for indoor and outdoor museum €18.50 (adult). Book online at zuiderzeemuseum.nl to skip the desk queue. The indoor section is open year-round; the outdoor section is seasonal (late March to October, weather permitting).

Walk to stop 3: The outdoor museum is accessed by boat from the Binnenmuseum, or by a 10-minute walk around the harbor. The boat (included in ticket) is more atmospheric.

3. Zuiderzee Museum — Outdoor Section (Buitenmuseum)

Time here: 75 minutes

The outdoor museum is one of those rare places that justifies the travel entirely on its own. More than 130 buildings from fishing towns around the old Zuiderzee were dismantled brick by brick and reassembled here on the shore of the IJsselmeer between 1975 and 1983. What emerged is not a theme park but a genuine reconstruction of how people actually lived in these communities between roughly 1880 and 1932.

Walk into the Marken neighborhood: the dark wooden fishermen’s houses built on stilts above the polder, with the low ceilings, small windows, and compact sleeping cabins typical of island life. Cross to the Urk section: white-painted houses, a working smokehouse where you can watch herrings being cured over oak chips. Follow the canal to the Enkhuizen neighborhood: the tile-roofed storehouses, the dyer’s workshop, the cooperage where barrels are still being made by hand.

What makes this work is that the buildings are not empty — they’re staffed by people who demonstrate the actual trades: a blacksmith shoeing horses, a baker pulling loaves from a wood-fired oven, a woman in traditional Volendam costume weaving on a loom. These are not performances; they’re real trades being kept alive.

Don’t miss: The working herring smokehouse in the Urk section. The smell alone is worth the trip. Ask the smoker how long the process takes — the answer is more complex than you’d expect.

Practical tip: Give yourself at least 90 minutes in the outdoor museum if you can. If short on time, prioritize the Marken fishermen’s houses and the smokehouse over the agricultural sections further from the entrance. The outdoor museum closes in bad weather — call ahead in October.

Walk to stop 4: Return by boat to the Binnenmuseum, then walk west along the Westerstraat into the old town center — 10 minutes.

4. The Old Town — Westerstraat & the Waag

Time here: 35 minutes

The Westerstraat is Enkhuizen’s main street and its spine — a long straight road of 17th and 18th-century houses that runs from the harbor to the edge of the old town. It’s not the most dramatic street in the Netherlands, but the scale is right: narrow enough to be intimate, with enough variation in gable styles and house widths to stay interesting.

Halfway along Westerstraat is the Waag (weighhouse), built in 1559 — a compact building with an octagonal tower and the original scales still inside. This is where the cargoes of herring and spices were weighed and taxed. Next to it, the 17th-century facades on Westerstraat have the dimensions of wealth without the showiness: merchants who made their money on fish didn’t build palaces, but they built solidly and well.

Don’t miss: The view from the junction of Westerstraat and Molenweg, looking toward the Dromedaris tower in the distance with the canal in the foreground. This is the axis of the old town, and it hasn’t changed since a Cornelis de Wit print of 1664 showed exactly this scene.

Practical tip: The Waag is sometimes open as a small historical display (free; check local signs). The Westerstraat has several good delicatessens and food shops where you can pick up smoked herring or local cheeses.

Walk to stop 5: Continue east along the Westerstraat to the Westerkerk — 5 minutes.

5. Westerkerk & the Inner Harbor

Time here: 25 minutes

The Westerkerk is a 14th-century Gothic church that dominates the western end of the old town — its tower visible from the harbor and from the IJsselmeer. The interior is severe and whitewashed in the Dutch Reformed tradition, with original 17th-century organ pipes and a collection of hatchments (painted funeral shields) from Enkhuizen’s merchant families.

From the church, walk south to the Binnenhaven (inner harbor). This is the working heart of old Enkhuizen: a long narrow harbor arm lined with traditional fishing boats, traditional sailing yachts, and the kind of weathered wooden huts that have been on harbor edges for 300 years. On a still day the reflection of the Dromedaris in the inner harbor water is the cleanest image of the town — the same image that appears in the 17th-century paintings.

Don’t miss: The afternoon light on the Binnenhaven looking west toward the Dromedaris. Come here between 3 and 5 pm and you’ll understand why Dutch painters kept coming back to harbor scenes.

Where to Eat & Drink

• Morning coffee: Café de Dijk (Dijk 74) — on the main harbor road with a terrace facing the water. Simple, local, the right place to start.
• Lunch: De Smidse (Westerstraat) — lunch in a converted blacksmith’s workshop. The herring sandwich (broodje haring) is the obvious choice and is genuinely good here.
• End-of-tour drink: Café De Waag (at the Waagplein) — terrace on the small square next to the weighhouse. Order a local jenever (Dutch gin) and watch the harbor traffic.

Practical Info

History & Fun Facts

• One of six VOC chambers. The VOC was not one company with one headquarters — it was a federation of six regional chambers, each raising capital, building ships, and sending expeditions independently. Enkhuizen’s chamber was among the wealthiest, with direct trading links to the Banda Islands and Japan.
• The Afsluitdijk killed the town in two years. The enclosure of the Zuiderzee was planned for decades and known to be coming. Fishermen knew it was coming. They still couldn’t adapt fast enough. Within two years of the Afsluitdijk’s completion in 1932, the herring-smoking industry had collapsed and hundreds of families had left.
• The botter boat was engineered for shallows. The flat-bottomed fishing boat of the Zuiderzee had a retractable centerboard (a zwaard) that could be raised when sailing in very shallow water and lowered for stability in deeper water. It’s an elegant engineering solution, and the boats in the Zuiderzee Museum still work.
• Enkhuizen was larger in 1650 than it is today. At its Golden Age peak, Enkhuizen had a population of around 20,000. Today’s population is 18,000. The town physically shrank as houses were demolished in the 18th and 19th centuries when there was nothing to fill them with.
• The Peperhuis was the VOC’s spice warehouse. Pepper, cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon came here from Asia before being distributed across Europe. The word peperhuis (pepper house) appears in Dutch inventories from 1625; the building that replaced the original now houses the museum.
• Smoked herring for the navy. Enkhuizen supplied smoked and salt-cured herring to the Dutch navy for most of the 17th century. The navy required specific curing standards — the Enkhuizen guild developed quality-control procedures that would be recognizable in any modern food inspection.
• The sea is still there. The IJsselmeer — the freshwater lake created when the Zuiderzee was enclosed — is visible from every high point in Enkhuizen. It’s not the sea the fishermen fished; the salinity changed, the herring left. But the water is still there, and on a clear day you can see the Afsluitdijk from the harbor wall.