Curious about what Nobel Prize winners, cumin-wielding cheesemakers, and the Pilgrims have in common? They’ve all called the Dutch city of Leiden home — at least for a while. Here are a few more fun facts to give you a glimpse into what makes this place so special.

A University Town

Fun Fact #1: Leiden is home to the oldest university in the Netherlands.

William of Orange granted this institution to the city in 1575 as a reward for its heroic resistance to a Spanish siege during the Eighty Years’ War.

Leiden University was founded on the cusp of the Dutch Golden Age, which began roughly ten years after its founding. The university, a site of intellectual inquiry and tolerance, became a magnet for scholars all over Europe (think folks like René Descartes and Hugo Grotius). Since its founding, the university has produced sixteen Nobel Laureates and twenty-six Spinoza Prize winners. All sorts of important people have studied there, including US President John Adams, Queen Juliana and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, and my maternal grandparents.

That building is the university’s Academiegebouw, a former convent that was secularized during the Reformation and later repurposed by the university. I’ve written more about other Leiden University buildings in this post about Dutch university towns (including fun facts about the  “sweatbox,” a room where students used to sit and wait for the results of their graduation exams).

The university still shapes the town today — you’ll see students (and their bicycles) everywhere.

Fun Fact #2: The first Dutch tulip was planted in Leiden, right here at the university’s Hortus Botanicus Leiden.

You can’t see any tulips in November — they’ve probably only just finished putting the bulbs in the ground — but it is amazing to be able to walk through the spot where all of the excitement began.

In 1593, the Habsburg ambassador to the Ottoman Empire sent a set of tulip bulbs to a group of European botanists. Some of these bulbs made their way to Carolus Clusius, a Dutch botanist and recently appointed Leiden University professor. For the first forty years, no one made a fuss about these new flowers. But in 1634, tulip bulbs burst onto the economic scene as an item of rampant speculation, leading to “tulip mania,” the world’s very first speculative bubble.

If you want to read more about this, I would recommend The Tulip: The Story of a Flower That Has Made Men Mad, by Anna Pavord; Michael Pollan also does an excellent job of covering it in The Botany of Desire. For tulip-related fiction, I’m a fan of The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas (of Three Musketeers and Count of Monte Cristo fame), though it’s only loosely connected to tulip mania.

Fun Fact #3: The city of Leiden has Wall Poems.

In keeping with its intellectual origins, the city partnered with two artists in the early 1990s to sponsor the painting of poems on the sides of local buildings. You can now find over 110 poems in languages including Dutch, Russian, Spanish, English, Arabic, Swedish, Japanese, and even Buginese (a language spoken by three ethnic groups in southern Sulawesi, Indonesia). Look up to find poems by William Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, E.E. Cummings, Federico García Lorca, W.B. Yeats, and more.

The Wall Poems have inspired Wall Formulas, which demonstrate the accomplishments of Leiden University’s science departments, “from bending light and the discovery of superconductivity to fundamental contributions to the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.”

Historic Buildings

Fact #4: Leiden has the second largest 17th-century town center in the Netherlands (Amsterdam has the largest).

The city was a major hub of study and commerce until it began to see an economic downturn in the late 17th century. But the old city center is still largely intact. You’ll find wonderful old structures, including the 16th-century Stadhuis (City Hall) …

… the mid-17th-century Morspoort, the western city gate …

… the 16th-century Heilige Lodewijkkerk (the first Roman Catholic church built after the Protestant Reformation) …

… the 1612 Stadstimmerwerf, which housed the city carpenter’s construction yard and residence …

… and fantastic old houses.

One much later building that’s worth a look is the 1891 Stadsgehoorzaal Leiden, a huge concert hall. It was built in a Neo-Renaissance style, which stands out because monuments like these are rarely seen anywhere in the Netherlands — it feels remarkably non-Dutch.

As you look around at the buildings, keep an eye out for the Leiden town seal: two crossed red keys on a white background.

Fun Fact #5: The Pilgrims hung out in Leiden before they departed for the New World.

This is the church in which they worshipped.

The Pieterskerk (St. Peter’s Church) was built over a period of 180 years, from 1390 until roughly 1570. The multiple phases of construction mean that as you walk around it, you notice different building materials and styles.

The building is no longer consecrated as a church, so it has no pews. And iconoclasts destroyed the stained glass windows during the Beeldenstorm, or Iconoclastic Fury (I love that translation) of the Protestant Reformation; a gunpowder explosion in 1807 took care of what stained glass remained. As a result, the interior space feels bright and eerily empty.

Still, there are plenty of interesting things to see inside. They have a framed copy of the Mayflower Compact …

… amazing carved gravestones in the church floor …

… and plenty of skulls:

Fun Fact #6: Leiden is home to 35 historical hofjes, or almshouses.

In the Netherlands, you’ll find a tradition of wealthy church donors founding hofjes. These residences allowed women without means to live in small apartment communities around a garden courtyard (the founders usually also required these women to share their faith). They’ve been around since the Middle Ages in Leiden, but the building of the city’s hofjes peaked in the 15th and 17th centuries with local textile booms. 

Most hofjes are still occupied today, and while they are private living spaces, most have public hours when you can pop in and take a peek.

Waterways & Windmills

Fun Fact #7: Leiden has more waterways than any Dutch city except Amsterdam.

First designed as defensive moats to protect the city’s growing town center in the 17th century, Leiden’s canals now stretch out to a full 268 kilometers. To manage getting around, the city has constructed 88 bridges for pedestrians and cars.

Fun Fact #8: Leiden has windmills!

The city used to have nineteen windmills lining the city walls, but only the towering Molen de Valk, which dates back to 1743, is still standing today.

The adorable Molen de Put is an even older model — the original was built in 1619. But it burned down, and then was rebuilt, and then destroyed, so this version is a replica.

You can read about these two mills in more detail in this blog post — and I’ve also written about everything you need to know about Dutch windmills here,

Food & Flavors

Fun Fact #9: Leiden is known for the eponymous Leidse kaas, or Leyden cheese

This semi-hard cheese made with cumin is delicious! I’m a huge fan of this nutty, perfectly spiced cheese, especially on a thick slice of Dutch brown bread.

The Netherlands offers so much in the way of cheese options, but Leidse kaas is unique. In the photo below, you’ll find cumin-speckled wheels and cut sections of Leidse kaas on the bottom left.

Cheese shops in Holland are so beautiful. This one is De Fransoos Cheese & Delicatessen, where they offer the valuable service of vacuum packing your cheese for shipping.

Fun fact #10: You can get pancakes that are bigger than your head.

Seriously — these things are huge:

I had this lemon-and-powdered-sugar pancake at Pannenkoekenhuys Oudt Leyden, a restaurant that has been serving perfectly thin pancakes on giant blue and white Dutch ceramic plates since 1907. Super yum!

Bonus Food Feature: If you’re looking for a smaller breakfast snack, don’t miss out on the amazing Appel Victoria at Friese Brood en Banketbakkerij Us Bertus. Dutch bakeries generally produce very good apple pastries — and this place excels.

I enjoy Leiden. It’s an interesting spot, historical and compact and walkable. Many days of the week, I’d take it over the nation’s much larger capital just to the north. But if you just want to check it out, you can easily do Leiden as a one-day trip from Amsterdam — it’s less than half an hour by train.

Final fun fact: If you’re there during flower season, Leiden is just a stone’s throw from some of the nation’s largest tulip fields. It’s worth timing your visit for sometime in April and then hopping on a bike to explore the fields near Sassenheim.

Excited to see more of Leiden?

• I’ve written more about the Molenmuseum De Valk (the windmill museum) in this post.
• Check out my post on Leiden’s Hortus Botanicus garden and the National Museum of Antiquities, also known as the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden.

If you love Dutch windmills, don’t miss this post on how they work and where to find them.