The Zaanse Schans is one of the most photographed places in the Netherlands and one of the least explained. Almost everything interesting about it is a fact somebody has to tell you, because the buildings themselves say nothing. You can walk the whole dike in ten minutes and come away knowing none of what follows. Here are fourteen, all documented, none of them padding, and every one of them changes what you are looking at.
1. There is no admission ticket, and there never has been
The Zaanse Schans is a freely accessible heritage village. There is no gate, no admission ticket and no entry fee — you walk in off the road and the windmill panorama costs nothing. The foundation that runs it describes it in its own words as “a famous freely accessible heritage area”. Plenty of travel pages sell a “Zaanse Schans ticket” anyway. What exists is the €29.50 Ticket Zaanse Schans, which opens museums and mills once you are already inside. The admission page has all of it.
2. It is not a UNESCO World Heritage Site
The Zaanse Schans has never been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Kinderdijk — a different windmill site, about 100 kilometres south — was, in 1997. The confusion is everywhere in the windmill trade, and it matters because the two places are genuinely different: Kinderdijk is a drainage landscape of polder mills; the Zaanse Schans is a collection of industrial mills that made things.
3. Claude Monet painted 25 paintings and 9 sketches here
In 1871 Monet spent several months at Zaandam and painted 25 paintings and 9 sketches of the Zaan, its windmills and its wooden houses. Of those canvases only four are in the Netherlands, and just one is in the Zaan region itself — it hangs in the Zaans Museum, a few hundred metres from the water in it.
4. The village arrived by road and by boat
The buildings are 17th, 18th and 19th century. The village is not. Between 1961 to 1974, houses, barns, warehouses, workshops and mills were brought here from all over the Zaan region on lowboy trailers and by water, to a plan Jaap Schipper drew in 1946. It is a real neighbourhood assembled out of real buildings, and its own foundation says so.
5. One mill was moved with its cap in one piece
De Zoeker, an oil mill estimated to date from about 1610, came to the Zaanse Schans in 1968. Its cap — eighteen tonnes of it — was moved whole, hoisted over railway overhead lines and then floated by boat to the eastern bank of the Zaan. It is open on Saturdays in June, July and August.
6. The Zaan had around six hundred working windmills
At its peak around six hundred mills worked here at once, which made this the oldest industrial region in Western Europe. They sawed timber and milled paper, spices, paint pigment, oil, flour, dyes, fibre and cocoa — wind-powered factories, all of them. Eleven survive on and around the dike, and you can walk past all eleven in a quarter of an hour.
7. All of it started with a crankshaft
In 1594, Cornelis Corneliszoon van Uitgeest patented a device that turned the horizontal spin of a windmill’s sails into a vertical stroke. Timber a team of sawyers cut by hand in a week could now be cut by wind in a day, and a region of marsh became a factory floor. The history page follows it through.
8. It made the Zaan the shipbuilding capital of Europe
Cheap sawn timber built ships. In the 17th century the Zaan became the centre of commercial shipbuilding in Europe, with 26 shipyards launching between 100 and 150 ships a year. Until the mid-19th century the region also held a significant share of Dutch whaling.
9. There is still a working paint mill on the dike
De Kat, built in 1664, is the only working paint mill in the world. It mills chalk, pigment and oils that are sold to artists and restorers, and when the stones are running you feel the whole building vibrate underfoot. That is the part nobody warns you about, and it costs €7.50 at the door.
10. The name means “sconce”, and there was a real one
A schans is an earthwork fortification. In 1574, during the Eighty Years’ War against Spanish rule, the Kalver-Schans stood across the road from where the village is now — the largest of about thirteen in the region, and the only one the Spanish never took. Nothing survives above ground, but a 1944 aerial photograph shows its rampart as a discolouration in the pasture.
11. And a holiday to go with it
In 1574 the Zaankanters beat the Spanish on Whit Monday and marked the victory with a holiday called Pinksterdrie. It faded, and in 2013 the foundation revived it as Pinksterzaan, which is still held on Whit Monday. The events page has this year’s date.
12. Albert Heijn’s first shop is here
In 1887 the 21-year-old Albert Heijn took over his parents’ grocery. That shop now stands at Kalverringdijk 5 with its original fittings and stock, and if you walk into it you get a genuinely strange few minutes — a century of retail, undone. It is free, and most people go straight past the door.
13. One mill marks the day the wind stopped
De Os is an oil mill dating from before 1663, one of the oldest the Zaan ever built. It turned on wind until 1916, when its cap, sails and stand were removed and its machinery was driven by a diesel engine instead. The last oil mills on the Zaan stopped altogether in 1936.
14. The toilets cost money and the cheese does not
A small fact with a large logic behind it. You pay €1 a visit for the public toilets, cards only, and €15.00 if you brought a car. Both go into maintaining the monuments, the bridges, the pavements and the gardens, and the foundation publishes that in its own words. Meanwhile the cheese demonstration and tasting and the entire clog workshop cost you nothing. It is an entrance fee, collected from the people who make the most work for the place — and if you come by bus you never meet it.
The Zaanse Schans by date
| The fact | The date |
|---|---|
| The Kalver-Schans, never taken by the Spanish | 1574 |
| The crankshaft patent | 1594 |
| Oil mill De Os built | before 1663 |
| Paint mill De Kat built | 1664 |
| Oil mill De Bonte Hen built | 1693 |
| Snuff mill De Huisman built | 1786 |
| Monet at Zaandam | 1871 |
| Albert Heijn takes over the shop | 1887 |
| De Os converts to diesel | 1916 |
| Jaap Schipper draws the plan | 1946 |
| The buildings arrive | 1961 to 1974 |
| De Zoeker moved with its cap in one piece | 1968 |
| Het Jonge Schaap rebuilt | 2007 |
| Pinksterzaan revived | 2013 |
Zaanse Schans day tour reach every one of these in an afternoon, and the guides who work here tell most of it better than a plaque does.
Fourteen facts is a start. Zaanse Schans Tours lists the days that come with somebody who knows the rest.
