Amsterdam (Rough Guide) - Martin Dunford [83]
Amadeus Grote Markt 10 023/532 4530, www.amadeus-hotel.com. This homely, medium-sized hotel has plain but perfectly comfortable en-suite rooms for around €80 a double including breakfast. The front bedrooms have pleasant views over the main square.
Amrath Grand Hotel Frans Hals Damstraat 10 023/518 1818, www.bestwestern.com. Right in the town centre, this modern chain hotel has 79 smart and well-appointed modern rooms for around €100 most of the time, breakfast not included.
Carillon Grote Markt 27 023/531 0591, www.hotelcarillon.com. Bang on the Grote Markt, this couldn’t be more central. Rooms are fine if a little Spartan, but they’re well equipped and good value at €80 a double. Triples and quads for around €100.
Stempels Klokhuisplein 9 023/512 3910. Housed in a former printworks right behind the Grote Kerk, this is a complex of boutique hotel, bar and restaurant that does its best to be Haarlem’s most desirable place to stay. The staff could be friendlier but its doubles for €100–140 are reasonable value.
Day-trips from the city | Haarlem |
The Town
At the heart of Haarlem is the Grote Markt, a wide and attractive open space flanked by an appealing ensemble of neo-Gothic, Gothic and Renaissance architecture, including an intriguing, if exceptionally garbled, Stadhuis, whose turrets and towers, balconies, gables and galleries were put together in piecemeal fashion between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the other end of the Grote Markt stands a statue of a certain Laurens Coster (1370–1440), who, Haarlemmers insist, is the true inventor of printing. Legend tells of Coster cutting a letter “A” from the bark of a tree, dropping it into the sand by accident, and, hey presto, he realized how to create the printed word. The statue shows him earnestly holding up the letter concerned, though actually most historians agree that it was the German Johannes Gutenberg who invented printing in the 1440s.
Day-trips from the city | Haarlem | The Town |
Haarlem’s hofjes
You could do worse than spend a day exploring Haarlem’s hofjes – small, unpretentious complexes of public housing built for the old and infirm in the seventeenth century. The best known and perhaps most accessible is the one that was home to Frans Hals in the last years of his life and is now the museum dedicated to him and his contemporaries. But there are others dotted around town, most of them still serving their original purpose but with their gardens at least open to the public. The most grandiose is the riverside Teylers Hofje, a little way east of the museum of the same name around the bend of the Spaarne at Koudenhorn 64. Unlike most of the other hofjes, which are decidedly cosy, this is a Neoclassical edifice dating from 1787 and featuring solid columns and cupolas. To the west, the elegant fifteenth-century tower of the Bakenesserkerk on Vrouwestraat is a flamboyant, onion-domed affair soaring high above the Haarlem skyline, and marks the nearby Bakenes Hofje, Haarlem’s oldest, with a delightful enclosed garden. On the other side of the city centre, the Brouweshofje, just off Botermarkt, is a small, peaceful rectangle of housing, with windows framed by brightly painted red and white shutters, while the nearby Hofje Van Loo, on nearby Barrevoetstraat, is unlike the rest, open to view from the road.
Day-trips from the city | Haarlem | The Town |
The Grote Kerk
The Coster statue stands in the shadow of the Grote Kerk, or Sint Bavokerk (Mon–Sat 10am–4pm; €2), a soaring Gothic structure supported by mighty buttresses, which dwarfs the surrounding clutter of ecclesiastical outhouses. If you’ve been to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (see "The Rijksmuseum"), the church may seem familiar, at least from the outside, since it turns up in several paintings of Haarlem by the seventeenth-century artists Berckheyde and Saenredam – only the black-coated burghers are missing. Finished in 1538, and 150 years in the making, the church is surmounted by a handsome lantern tower, which perches above the transept crossing; the tower is