Leiden

Since 1992 poems in many languages have gone up on walls in their original scripts. One of them is in Korean, and a map lets you work through them in order.

Earth was piled where two rivers meet and crowned with a round wall. Walking the rampart costs nothing, and the roofs lie below you.

Laid out in 1590, it ranks among the oldest botanic gardens in Europe. Records tie the first tulips grown here to this ground, and that bed has been recreated.

A whole Egyptian temple was moved here and raised in the entrance hall. It came as a gift when a dam on the Nile was about to put it under water.

One tyrannosaur skeleton stands here nearly complete. Behind glass you can see the store that holds forty two million specimens.

The Pilgrim leader lies buried here, and the building now hosts events rather than services. The whole floor is grave slabs, so you walk across names.

Inside a seven storey mill the rooms where the miller's family lived are kept as they were. A narrow ladder connects each floor, and the wind is loud near the top.

Two rings of water wrap the centre, so the inner and outer channels run separately. Boats can be hired and steered yourself with no licence required.

The Japanese and Indonesian holdings are the deepest, and how each came here is written up beside them. Every display carries a panel explaining the route it took.

Twenty minutes away by road, opening in late March and closing in the middle of May. Seven million bulbs go in fresh each year, so the layout changes every season.

The municipal museum, housed in the 17th-century hall of the cloth guild. Its prize is the Last Judgment triptych by Lucas van Leyden, a native of the town. Paintings from Rembrandt's early years here hang alongside.

The country's first university uses an old convent chapel as its main hall. Doctoral candidates wait before their defence in a small room called the sweating room, and those who pass sign its walls. Signatures cover every surface, famous scholars among them.

The national museum of scientific instruments from 1600 onwards. Early microscopes, a Huygens pendulum clock and the apparatus that first liquefied helium are here. A reconstructed anatomy theatre is ringed with skeletons.

A museum of what the physician Siebold gathered while posted in Japan from 1823 to 1829. His canal house holds specimens, crafts and maps. Japanese visitors make a point of coming.

The western city gate over the canal, one of two gates still standing. Cross the drawbridge beside it and the canal path leads toward De Valk windmill. At sunset the gate reflects in the water, and plenty of people stop to photograph it.

The Pilgrims who later sailed on the Mayflower lived in this city from 1609 to 1620. A small house built between 1365 and 1370 holds furniture and books of their time. It is just two rooms, so the visit is really the curator's talk.

A Gothic church begun in 1377 and never built to its planned size. That is why the transepts stand taller than the nave, giving it odd proportions. Mayor van der Werff, who held out through the 1574 siege, is buried inside.

From 7 on Saturday mornings and from noon on Wednesdays, stalls line both banks of the Nieuwe Rijn. Vegetables, fish, flowers and cheese continue across the bridges. It is the day to taste and pick the local cumin cheese.

A North Sea beach village, twenty minutes west of Leiden by car. A small white church where the promenade stops anchors every seaward photo. North of the village stand the sluices where the Rhine finally reaches the sea.