Kinderdijk windmills: one best tourist sites in the Netherlands
Kinderdijk is a small village 15 km east of Rotterdam witn the largest concentration of old windmills in the world! The 18th century windmills of Kinderdijk are one of the best known tourist sites in the Netherlands and are on the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites.

19 historic mills
You can walk along the dikes and see the 19 windmills that were built around 1740 to drain the Kinderdijk polder. These mills were very important to keep the area from being flooded because most of the Netherlands is below sealevel.

Keep your feet dry below sea level
The mills in Kinderdijk kept the low-lying land dry by pumping water into a reservoir when the water had reached a certain level. The water in the reservoir could be released to the Lek river or pumped back again by other windmills whenever the water level was low enough. Nowadays the windmills have been replaced by a power-driven pumping engines but they are very well preserved. They are still operational but of little use for for drainage.

Visit one of the mills in Kinderdijk
You can even visit one of the windmills in Kinderdijk yourself and learn how the Dutch kept their lowlands dry. Nobody lives in the mill nowadays but you can feel how living in a mill must have been, because all the old pots and pans, wooden shoes and traditional tapestry that were used in the mill are still there.

Not enough time to visit the Kinderdijk windmills?
Do you stay in Rotterdam and don't have enough time to visit the Kinderdijk windmills? Or do you like the Kinderdijk windmills so much that you would like to see more historic windmills? In that it's definitely worth to visit the historic windmills (Plasmolens) which are located in Rotterdam!