The Highlights of The Hague

The stops

Walk them in order; each story plays when you reach its pin.

Map of the 12 stops on The Highlights of The Hague

1
Stop 1
Welcome to The Hague
A town that stayed a village for centuries and ran the country anyway. The walk starts here.
2
Stop 2
Harry and the Hague Dialect
The cartoonist who put the broadest Hague accent on paper grew up in the polite part of town.
3
Stop 3
Spinoza's Empty Grave
Behind this church stands a grave monument to a philosopher whose bones have been lost for almost three centuries.
Read the story
4
Stop 4
The Ice Palace
The nickname was an insult. Thirty years on, people from The Hague get married here and keep the photographs on the mantelpiece.
Read the story
5
Stop 5
The Passage
Under this glass roof men found each other at a time when the law was against them.
Read the story
6
Stop 6
The Ridderzaal, once the Lottery Hall
The name is nineteenth-century romanticism. For centuries this building was known as the Lottery Hall.
Read the story
7
Stop 7
When Orange Was Banned
In 1784 the States of Holland banned the colour orange, on pain of death if need be.
Read the story
8
Stop 8
The Mauritshuis, the Sugar Palace
Contemporaries mocked this house as the Sugar Palace, and its most famous painting once changed hands for two guilders thirty.
Read the story
9
Stop 9
The Torentje on the Hofvijver
A dune lake with beer ships, an island nobody may set foot on, and a phrase that outlived its own building.
10
Stop 10
Lange Voorhout
Beneath the crunching shell sand of the country's grandest avenue sits a structure three metres deep.
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11
Stop 11
Noordeinde Palace, the palace that stood boarded up
After the fire of 1948 this palace stood boarded up, and for a quarter of a century students walked its corridors.
Read the story
12
Stop 12
The Rules of Rusthof
A set of rules written in 1841 still decides who may live here.
Read the story