Delft trip
When you go on a Delft trip, you’ll be visiting a very compact, charming and relaxed city, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise considering this is in The Netherlands.
The town is a popular tourist destination, with day trippers especially coming here to stroll Delft’s narrow, canal-lined streets while looking at the remarkable old buildings or just pondering the life and career of Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer, if you’re into that sort of thing.
The city is quite famous for ‘delftware’, a distinctive blue-and-white pottery which initially duplicated the Chinese porcelain by 17th-century artisans.
The city was founded sometime around 1100 and became rich from weaving and trade in the 13th and 14th centuries. In the 15th century a canal was dug so as to connect it to the Maas river, and the small port there, Delfshaven, was eventually assimilated by Rotterdam.
There are quite a few sights in Delft to mark down on your travel itinerary, most of these being some rather old buildings which are worth a visit on their own, not to mention what they contain within as well.
The Nieuwe Kerk is a building from the 14th-century that houses the crypt of the Dutch royal family and the mausoleum of Willem the Silent. It also features exhibitions about the House of Orange and the church.
The Municipal Museum het Prinsenhof is an ex-convent where Willem the Silent was assassinated in 1584 – the bullet hole in the wall is covered in Perspex to protect it from inquisitive visitors. The exhibitions tell the story of the Eighty Years War with Spain and a plethora of 17th-century paintings.
The Oude Kerk is an 800-year old tower that leans two meteres from the vertical and one of the tombs inside is actually Vermeer’s.
Those who enjoy old weapons, there’s the Legermuseum which features a collection of old Dutch military hardware displayed in a restored 17th-century arsenal. There are also exhibits on the modern Dutch army.
