Leiden, An Alternative to Amsterdam?, Leiden, Netherlands

One of my aims on my recent visit to the Netherlands was to find a city that could offer an alternative tourist destination to Amsterdam. Why? Because, although Amsterdam is undeniably beautiful, and interesting, it is also packed with visitors. The figures are hard to estimate, but at least 17m tourists went to Amsterdam in 2016. And the figures are rising, to the extent that new measures are being implemented such as increased tourist taxes and a clamp-down on AirBNB.

All of this means that, not only is Amsterdam often unpleasantly crowded, but space is at a premium, so that hotel rooms can be hard to find and are often very small. In my quest to find an alternative I came up with Leiden, a university city with canals and cafés galore. A bit like a smaller version of Amsterdam (although I didn’t notice any drugs or a red light district - which might be a good or a bad thing, depending on your point of view…)

Like Amsterdam, Leiden is a canal-based city. Ringed by a 6 km moat, it has a total of 28 km of canals and 88 bridges. In fact it has more canals than any other Dutch city apart from Amsterdam.

You can take a cruise along the canals, passing houseboats, historic buildings and old warehouses. Look out for the two oldest bridges in Leiden - the 12th century Visbrug (“Fish Bridge”) and the Koornbrug (“Grain Bridge”), built in 1642. Then there is Rapensburg, once described as “the most beautiful street in the world”. ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).