Landscape and wildlife

A picturesque landscape on the bottom of the sea

Once you come over to visit Kinderdijk for yourself, you will not only dive into a unique tale of creaking windmills and raging storms. You will also take a literal plunge into a landscape that is more than two metres below sea level in some places! For centuries, the millers of Kinderdijk drained their polders, and the lands they managed to reclaim became a unique environment of peat soil, meadows, ditches, and canals, enclosed by the strong dykes of the district water board. Note, for access to our visitor locations you need to buy an entrance ticket online in advance

Stroll through a Dutch Master's painting

This gorgeous area has become home to an enormous wealth of plant and animal life that is just as much at ease around these polders as their human neighbours. All around Kinderdijk, you are completely free to come and enjoy a landscape where picturesque lines of trees, waving fringes of reeds, and gently murmuring waterways make you feel as if you’ve walked right into a painting by some famous Dutch Master somehow.

Great opportunities for photographers

Here, the old mills protect not just the people against the water; you will find chirping meadow birds, foxes, martens, frogs, and salamanders living side by side here, among these wide expanses of nature that should actually be on the ocean floor. Kinderdijk is a great site for the best wildlife pictures and landscape photography, so be sure to bring your camera along when you visit. You won’t find a more unique landscape anywhere else!

Kinderdijk is great for photography, so bring your camera along!

Come and wander, cycle, sail, experience, and enjoy

The land surrounding the Kinderdijk windmills is just teeming with plants and wildlife. Here, birds, insects, rodents, and a host of other species have found a home for as long as anyone can remember. The old polder roads and dykes make great cycling and walking trails that take you across windmill country, where the environment and human ingenuity merge into a unique experience of natural beauty and historical wealth.

Bring or rent a bike for a healthy Dutch day out in the country

We invite you come to Kinderdijk and jump or pedal right into this adventure yourself. Bring your bicycle, or rent one right around the corner, for a healthy, enjoyable, and genuine Dutch day out in the country. Relish the experience of the Dutch polders as they used to be in ages past. You will smell the water as you listen to the windmill sails and birds overhead, while the fresh breeze sends billowing clouds drifting by along the vast expanse of the Dutch skies.

Rare species and Natura 2000

Discover the largest colony of purple herons in Western Europe and other rare birds stalking the meadows; see frogs hop off into the reeds, and take in the magnificent green landscapes drawn right from some old picture book. Due to the rare and special nature and wildlife typical of Kinderdijk, the area has been included in the European project of Natura 2000. A cycling trip or hiking trail starting at Kinderdijk is an unmatched voyage of discovery straight through the cultural and natural countryside of the Dutch Green Heart.  You will only find a day out like this in the grandiose interplay between ecology and water management that makes Kinderdijk so unique!