Gouda, Netherlands Hotels, Vacations, Tourism

A pretty little place some 25km northeast of Rotterdam, GOUDA is almost everything you'd expect of a Dutch country town: a ring of quiet canals encircling ancient buildings and old quays. Its Markt is the largest in Holland, a reminder of the town's prominence as a centre of the medieval cloth trade, and later of the manufacture of cheeses and clay pipes. A touristy cheese market is held here every Thursday morning from June to August. Slap bang in the middle, the elegant Gothic Stadhuis dates from 1450; on the north side is the Waag , a tidy seventeenth-century building whose top two floors house a cheese … more »