The Hague

About

The Hague is the capital city of the South Holland province of the Netherlands. With a population of over half a million, it is the third-largest city in the Netherlands. Situated on the west coast facing the North Sea, The Hague is the country's administrative centre and its seat of government, and has been described as the country's de facto capital since the time of the Dutch Republic, while Amsterdam is the official capital of the Netherlands.

Summary excerpted from the Wikipedia article The Hague, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text may be clipped or paraphrased to fit this page.

Why visit

Visit The Hague for museums, galleries, and collections, music, theater, and performance, landscape, water, gardens, and nearby routes. The value of The Hague is clearest when museums, streets, religious buildings, markets, food, and nearby landscape are read together. A good itinerary should stay selective. Use one main anchor in The Hague, then build outward only to places that sit naturally nearby. That restraint helps The Hague feel like a place rather than a sequence of obligations. For The Hague, nearby landscapes and day trips should explain the city, not turn the itinerary into transit work.

When to avoid

Do not visit The Hague expecting every useful stop to be close together or easy to improvise. The map of The Hague is only half the problem; hours, heat, rain, crowds, and transport decide what is realistic. In The Hague, it is better to build a tight route than to rely on long transfers between secondary stops. If the main interest is one nearby site, it may be better to treat The Hague as a base rather than the whole destination.