Naarden

Naarden is a town inside a military diagram: a six-pointed star of bastions and moats, unchanged since 1685, where 1,500 people still live as if the 17th century simply forgot to end.

Naarden's six-pointed fortress — one of the best-preserved star forts in Europe

The City in 60 Seconds

In 1572, Spanish troops under Don Frederick of Toledo entered Naarden under a flag of truce and systematically killed every man, woman, and child in the town — roughly 400 people — before burning it to the ground. The event became one of the most notorious atrocities of the 80 Years’ War. The town was rebuilt, the Spanish eventually left, and in 1675 the Dutch began constructing a fortress on the site that would become one of the finest examples of scientific military architecture in Europe.

The fortress follows the principles of geometric defensive design: every bastion angle calculated to eliminate blind spots, every wall segment covered by crossfire from two adjacent bastions. Naarden’s particular version has six bastions and six ravelins, creating the perfect star shape visible from the air. The complete system — earthen walls, water-filled moats, underground casemates — is still intact, still surrounding the same 17th-century streets, still filled with water.

One caveat: Naarden is not a theme park. People live inside the walls. The restaurants are local, the streets are quiet on weekday mornings, and it can feel like a forgotten village rather than a heritage site — which is exactly why it’s worth going.

Route

1. The Fortress Walls — Rampart Walk

Time here: 45 minutes

Start at the top of the ramparts, accessible from the Turfpoortbastion on the east side of the old town. From up here the geometry of the fortress becomes readable: the straight lines of the outer moat, the V-shapes of the ravelins pushing forward from the main wall, the way each bastion angle covers the wall faces on either side. It’s not decorative — it’s arithmetic made into earth and stone.

Look inward: a dense cluster of 17th-century gabled houses no taller than two stories, with the Grote Kerk tower rising at the center. Look outward: the flat Dutch polders, unchanged in any direction. The view makes clear why the site was chosen: any approaching army would be visible from a kilometre away and under fire from multiple bastions simultaneously.

Don’t miss: The northwest corner of the walls, where you can see three bastions simultaneously — the best vantage point for grasping the full star pattern from ground level.

Practical tip: The rampart walk is free and always open. Wear flat shoes — the grassed slopes are slippery after rain. A full circuit of the walls is about 3 km; you can see the key sections in 45 minutes by focusing on the eastern and northern bastions.

Walk to stop 2: Descend near the Arnhemse Poort gate and walk west along Cattenhagestraat toward the Grote Kerk — 5 minutes.

2. Grote Kerk (St. Vitus) — Gothic Church with Vault Paintings

Time here: 40 minutes

The Grote Kerk is a 15th-century Gothic hall church with one of the most remarkable interiors in the Netherlands — 25 barrel-vault paintings depicting scenes from the Old and New Testament, painted between 1510 and 1518, covering the entire ceiling in vivid reds, blues, and gold. Most Dutch churches were stripped during the Reformation: whitewashed, emptied of images. Naarden’s paintings survived because they were plastered over in the 17th century and only rediscovered in the 1890s. What you’re looking at is a medieval interior that never got the Protestant treatment.

The church also holds the mausoleum of Jan Amos Comenius, the Czech educational reformer who died in Naarden in 1670. Comenius is considered the father of modern pedagogy: his method of teaching languages through pictures and systematic repetition remains the basis of language teaching today. His 1658 book Orbis Sensualium Pictus — the first children’s illustrated encyclopaedia — was used in European classrooms for 150 years. He ended up in Naarden because the Bohemian Brethren, his religious congregation, had a church here after being expelled from Central Europe.

Don’t miss: The vault painting above the main entrance — the Last Judgment, with the damned falling into a particularly detailed Hell on the right side. Look for the figure being swallowed headfirst by a monster.

Practical tip: Entry €4. Combined ticket with the Comenius Museum next door €7. The museum is small but rewarding — Comenius influenced Locke, Leibniz, and Newton, and the displays explain why without being dry.

Walk to stop 3: Exit the church onto Marktstraat and walk east 2 minutes to the Vestingmuseum entrance at the Turfpoortbastion.

3. Vestingmuseum — Underground in the Casemates

Time here: 50 minutes

The casemates are the vaulted underground chambers built into the fortress walls for storing powder, weapons, and troops. Naarden’s casemates are among the most complete in the Netherlands — long brick tunnels running beneath the bastions, with branching chambers, ventilation shafts, and drainage channels. They’re cold, slightly damp, and smell of old stone.

The Vestingmuseum uses the casemate complex to explain Dutch fortress history, from medieval walls to the New Dutch Waterline of the 19th century. The 1:250 scale model of Naarden in the main hall is the best way to grasp the full three-dimensional geometry of the defenses — the earthen glacis slopes, the water-filled ditch, the counterscarp, the covered way, the moat. On a map it looks flat; in the model you understand why it was considered impregnable.

Don’t miss: The full-size reproduction cannon aimed through an original embrasure. The sightline through the wall shows exactly why the angular geometry of the bastions was calculated the way it was — and how little margin an attacker had before coming under fire from three directions.

Practical tip: Entry €8.50. Guided tours run on weekends, included in the ticket price. A light jacket is useful even in summer — the tunnels are cool year-round.

Walk to stop 4: Walk back through the old town on Marktstraat to the Markt square — 5 minutes.

4. The Old Town Streets & Markt

Time here: 30 minutes

The Markt is a small square with a handful of buildings around it, and it looks exactly as it should: unchanged. The gabled houses on Marktstraat, Cattenhagestraat, and the connecting lanes are 17th and 18th century. Several have original stepped gables. The cobbles are uneven. Nothing has been rebuilt; nothing has been restored to tourist-attraction gloss.

Walk the side streets. What you’re looking at is a town preserved by its own walls — the fortress prevented expansion, the heritage status prevented demolition, and the result is an accidental time capsule that feels genuinely inhabited rather than curated. Residents have put out flowerpots. A cat is probably sleeping on a step.

Don’t miss: The view along Cattenhagestraat from the small canal bridge looking toward the church tower. The proportions of this street — the house heights, the width of the road, the tower in the background — are what a Dutch Golden Age town looked like from the inside.

Practical tip: Café De Waag on the Markt is the best coffee stop. In summer the terrace faces the square.

Walk to stop 5: From the Markt, walk south along Zuidwalstraat to the moat path.

5. The Southern Moat — Water Walk

Time here: 25 minutes

The last stop is the moat from outside the walls. Walk south on Zuidwalstraat, then take the path along the outer edge of the southern moat. Here you see what most visitors miss: the fortress from the outside, with the grassed earthen bastions rising from the water, the V-shapes of the ravelins reflected in the moat, and the tops of the church tower and gabled rooftops just visible above the walls.

Swans use the moat in summer. The path is nearly always quiet on weekdays. From the southeast corner you can see two bastions simultaneously with the curve of the curtain wall between them — the view that appears in most aerial photographs, now seen at water level.

Don’t miss: Stop at the southeastern corner where the footpath curves around a ravelin tip. The bastion, moat, and outer earthworks are at their most complete here, and the geometry of the design makes the most sense from this particular angle.

Where to Eat & Drink

• Morning coffee: Café De Waag (Markt 19) — the old weigh house on the main square. Good coffee, the only proper terrace in the center.
• Lunch: Arsenaalkazerne (Westwalstraat) — lunch in a converted arsenal building at the edge of the old town. Solid soups and sandwiches; the interior courtyard is worth finding.
• End-of-tour drink: Restaurant Arsenaal (Kooltjesbuurt 1) — terrace facing the moat at the base of the southwestern bastion. Order a local beer and watch the light change on the water.

Practical Info

History & Fun Facts

• The Naarden Massacre. On 1 December 1572, Spanish troops entered under a white flag promising safe conduct, then killed all 400 inhabitants and burned the town. The event hardened Dutch resistance across the country. Alva tried to suppress word of it; it leaked to Protestant Europe within weeks.
• The maths of the star. Each bastion point is calculated so that defenders can fire along the wall faces to either side — meaning anyone attacking the wall between two bastions comes under simultaneous fire from two directions. There’s no dead ground. The entire shape is determined by the geometry of eliminating blind spots.
• Comenius changed how you learned. His 1658 book Orbis Sensualium Pictus — words illustrated by labelled pictures — was the first children’s encyclopaedia and the prototype of every illustrated language textbook since. It was translated into 12 languages in his lifetime. He’s buried in a small chapel attached to the Grote Kerk.
• Cape Horn is not from here. That’s Hoorn. But Naarden’s fortress was the model for military engineers across northern Europe. Its bastion angles were measured, drawn, and copied from England to Prussia.
• 1,500 people still live inside. The fortress town has a supermarket (behind a restored warehouse facade), a primary school, and a handful of restaurants. Residents fought off plans to add a car park inside the walls in the 1980s by pointing out that a car park would require demolishing a 17th-century granary.
• The walls absorbed the German bombardment. When German forces invaded in May 1940, Naarden was shelled. The earthen bastions absorbed the impacts far better than masonry walls would have — which is precisely what they were designed for. The town held out longer than almost any other Dutch fortified position in the 1940 campaign.
• The moat level is controlled. Naarden’s moats are connected to the Gooimeer lake by a system of sluices. In the original 17th-century defense plan, these could be used to flood the surrounding polders — creating a broad zone of shallow water that artillery couldn’t cross and infantry couldn’t wade. This “inundation defense” concept defined Dutch military strategy for 200 years.