Things to do
6-
Cube Houses
Piet Blom's 1984 housing scheme: thirty-eight yellow cubes tipped forty-five degrees onto hexagonal pillars above a pedestrian bridge, each meant as a tree in an urban forest. They are lived in. One has been opened as a show home so visitors can see how furniture copes with walls that all slope. The answer is that a quarter of the floor area is unusable.
-
Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen
A bowl-shaped building clad entirely in mirrors, opened in 2021 as the first art storage facility anywhere to admit the public. The whole collection of the city's main museum, over 150,000 objects, hangs on racks and sits in climate-controlled rooms that visitors see through glass or enter on guided tours. The museum itself next door is closed for a long renovation. Birch trees grow on the roof.
-
Erasmusbrug
A cable-stayed bridge of 1996 across the Nieuwe Maas, hung from a single bent pylon 139 metres tall that earned it the nickname of the Swan. It joined the city centre to the derelict southern docks and started their redevelopment into the present tower district. Walk across toward the Hotel New York, the old Holland America Line headquarters, for the skyline view back.
-
Euromast
An observation tower raised for a 1960 garden festival and extended a decade later to stay the tallest thing in the city, now 185 metres. A rotating glass lift climbs the upper spire. From the top the scale of the port becomes clear, docks and cranes running west to the horizon. On clear days Antwerp is said to be visible. Abseiling sessions run in summer.
-
Kinderdijk
Nineteen windmills built around 1740 stand in two rows along a pair of canals, pumping water up out of reclaimed farmland that lies below the level of the river. It is the largest group of old mills in the country and a UNESCO site. The paths between them are free to walk or cycle; two mills open as museums. The waterbus from central Rotterdam is the pleasant way to arrive.
-
Markthal
A horseshoe-shaped apartment block, opened in 2014, arches over a covered food market so that residents look down on the stalls through their floor windows. The inside of the arch carries a mural of tumbling fruit, flowers and insects covering eleven thousand square metres. Around a hundred stalls sell produce and cooked food. The old open-air market still sets up outside twice a week.