🇳🇱 Netherlands · South and north
Groningen is the great capital of the northern Netherlands and, for many, one of the country's loveliest surprises: a historic, cultured, lively city that barely appears on rushed itineraries. Founded on land won from the water, dominated by the silhouette of its enormous medieval tower, the Martinitoren, and animated by one of the oldest universities in Europe, it has the pulse of a big city and the scale of a town you can cover on foot or by bike.
It is also a deeply young and cycling city. With tens of thousands of students, it has the lowest average age in the Netherlands, and it is one of the most bike-minded places on the planet: close to half of all urban journeys are made by pedal, a proportion that rises even higher in the centre. That university atmosphere gives it bars, music, terraces, culture and an infectious energy, with an old town lovingly rebuilt after the destruction of the Second World War.
This guide covers the essentials of Groningen with a practical eye: how to climb the Martinitoren, what to see on the rebuilt Grote Markt, how to enjoy the bold Groninger Museum and its Renaissance gardens, how to get around by bike, and why this city carries a very real and painful recent history: that of the Slochteren gas field and the earthquakes that damaged thousands of homes across the province. A different, authentic and highly recommendable stop in the Dutch north.
Groningen was born more than two thousand years ago in the low-lying north, where the first inhabitants raised artificial mounds called terpen or wierden to live safe from flooding by the sea. In the Middle Ages it became the most powerful city in the north, prosperous from the grain trade and tied to the Hanseatic world, with the Martinitoren dominating the landscape. In 1614 it founded its university, the second oldest in the country, which shaped its young and cultured character for good. Its most dramatic chapter came in April 1945, when the battle of Groningen between Canadian and German troops destroyed much of the Grote Markt, later rebuilt. And in recent times, the discovery in 1959 of the gigantic Slochteren gas field brought wealth but also decades of induced earthquakes that damaged thousands of homes, until the field was definitively closed in 2023-2024. All of that is told in detail on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The extremes of the Netherlands: Maastricht, the Roman city of the south where the treaty that created the European Union was signed in 1992; the lake village of Giethoorn; Groningen, the Hanseatic city of the north transformed by gas; and Friesland, with a language of its own, and the Wadden Islands, a natural World Heritage Site.
Read the history of South and north →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before dikes existed, the people of the northern Netherlands learned to live with a permanent enemy: the sea. On the brackish clay plains that today form the province of Groningen, battered by North Sea tides and storms, the only way to live safe from the water was, literally, to raise the ground. So were born the terpen, which in Groningen are called wierden: artificial mounds on which houses and, later, whole villages were built.
The first were raised more than two thousand years ago, around the sixth or seventh century BC, when settlers colonised the coastal marshes. They began with a small platform for one or two houses and, generation after generation, enlarged and raised it with layers of turf, clay, dung and household waste, until they formed hills several metres high. People and animals lived on top when the tide flooded everything around. Hundreds of these mounds still remain in the Groningen countryside, many crowned by a sturdy medieval brick church: they are the characteristic mound villages of the north, a landscape unique in Europe.
In that amphibious world, between the rivers Hunze and Drentse Aa, a settlement arose slightly higher and better protected than the rest, on a tongue of sandy ground (a moraine) reaching into the marshes from the south. That safe spot, at the crossing of roads and waters, would be the seed of the city of Groningen. From the thirteenth century, when dike technology finally made it possible to enclose the marshes and win firm land, the wierden stopped being essential for survival, but the city that had grown on that raised mound was already on its way to greatness.
Through the Middle Ages, Groningen grew into the most powerful city in the whole northern Netherlands. Its position was privileged: it stood where the inland trade of Drenthe met the sea routes, and from very early on it knew how to exploit that. Around 1282 it joined the Hanseatic League, the great network of trading cities of northern Europe, and through it exported grain, fish and peat and imported luxury goods.
Its real source of power, however, was its iron grip on the countryside around it, the so-called Ommelanden ('surrounding lands'), a territory of Frisian villages on wierden and fertile clay soils. Groningen imposed a commercial monopoly on that region: the market right or 'staple right', which required all grain and goods from the Ommelanden to pass through its market and its weighhouse before being sold. That economic lever made it immensely rich and practically independent. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Groningen operated as an aristocratic republic, almost a city-state, effectively governing a wide territory between the river Ems and the Lauwerszee and maintaining a tense relationship of dominance with the free peasants of the Ommelanden.
From those centuries of splendour comes its greatest monument: St Martin's church (Martinikerk) and, above all, its tower, the Martinitoren, built in several stages until it reached almost 97 metres, one of the tallest in the Netherlands. The people of Groningen nicknamed it 'd'Olle Grieze', the old grey one, and it remains the city's undisputed symbol. Around its square, the Grote Markt, beat the political and commercial heart of a city that felt it was master of its own destiny. With the Reformation and the Eighty Years' War against Spain, Groningen eventually joined, after some hesitation, the young Republic of the United Provinces, keeping much of its proud autonomy.
In 1614, the government of the province of Groningen and the Ommelanden founded its own university, the second oldest in the Netherlands after Leiden. On 23 August that year it opened its doors with barely a few dozen students, housed in a former convent in the centre. It was a momentous decision: four centuries later, that university is still the engine of the city and the reason Groningen today has the lowest average age in the country, with tens of thousands of students giving it its unmistakable energy.
A few decades later, the city lived through its most celebrated epic. It was 1672, the 'Disaster Year' (Rampjaar) for the Dutch Republic, attacked at once by France, England and the bishoprics of Cologne and Münster. The warlike prince-bishop of Münster, Christoph Bernhard von Galen, threw himself at the north, claiming much of the province for himself. On 24 July 1672 his army of some 24,000 men laid siege to Groningen.
The city, well fortified with walls and moats, and with part of its surroundings deliberately flooded by opening dikes and sluices, held out. Leading the defence was the veteran Bohemian soldier Carl von Rabenhaupt. For a little over a month the bishop bombarded Groningen with thousands of cannonballs and incendiary bombs — so many that he earned the mocking nickname 'Bommen Berend', 'Bomb Berend' — but he failed to take it. Desertion and disease decimated his camp, and at the end of August the bishop ordered a retreat. The city was saved. Ever since, every 28 August Groningen celebrates its relief, the 'Gronings Ontzet', as its great local festival, with music, fairs and fireworks.
The most tragic and decisive chapter in the city's modern history was written in the last days of the Second World War. After almost five years of Nazi occupation, the liberation of the northern Netherlands fell to the Canadian army. In April 1945, with the war already all but lost for Germany, Groningen became a point of fierce resistance: the Canadian 2nd Infantry Division had to take the city house by house against a garrison of several thousand German soldiers reinforced by Dutch and Belgian SS troops.
The battle of Groningen was fought between 13 and 16 April 1945. It was extremely hard urban combat, little known outside Canada and the Netherlands, in which the Canadians advanced through the narrow streets of the centre under machine gun and sniper fire. The bitterest point was, precisely, the Grote Markt: the Germans had dug in inside the buildings on the north side of the square, and Canadian tanks had to shell them to dislodge them. When the smoke cleared, the north and east sides of the main square, the historic heart of the city, had been flattened. Hundreds of buildings were destroyed in all.
On 16 April, when all resistance was pointless, the German commander surrendered. Liberation came at a price in blood: dozens of Canadian soldiers killed and more than a hundred wounded, and around a hundred Groningen civilians caught in the crossfire. The city received its freedom with relief and gratitude, but with its central square in ruins. To this day Groningen keeps a special bond of gratitude with Canada, whose soldiers rest in war cemeteries in the region.
With peace came the difficult task of rebuilding the destroyed heart of the city. The Grote Markt, flattened on its north and east sides, was raised again in the postwar decades, but not as a faithful copy of what had been lost. The choice was to build in the taste of the time, more modern and functional, which gave the square a hybrid look: the old Martinitoren and the classical Town Hall coexisting with mid-twentieth-century façades. That decision was, and still is, a matter of debate among the people of Groningen, many of whom regret that the square was not rebuilt as it had been before the war.
In the decades that followed, Groningen reinvented itself as a modern regional capital. In the nineteen-seventies it took a bold and pioneering planning decision: it completely reorganised traffic in the centre to push out the car and give absolute priority to pedestrians and bicycles, dividing the old town into sectors that cars could not drive straight through. The result was spectacular and made Groningen a model for the world: today it is one of the most cycling-oriented cities on the planet, with close to half of all urban journeys made by bike.
The city also invested in culture and cutting-edge architecture. In 1994 it opened the striking Groninger Museum, a bold postmodern building of colours floating on the canal opposite the station, the work of a team of architects and designers coordinated by the Italian Alessandro Mendini. And in 2019 it opened the Forum Groningen, a spectacular cultural centre beside the Grote Markt whose rooftop, free to enter, offers the best views in the city today. The old Hanseatic city had turned into a young, green and creative capital.
No history of Groningen would be complete without the chapter that has marked the province most in recent decades: gas. In 1959, near the village of Slochteren, one of the largest natural gas fields in the world and the biggest in Europe was discovered beneath Groningen soil. The find transformed the Dutch economy: for more than half a century, Groningen gas heated millions of Dutch homes, fed industry and filled the state's coffers with enormous revenues.
But that wealth came at a cost borne, above all, by the province's own people. Continuous extraction gradually emptied the subsoil and caused it to subside, and in time induced earthquakes appeared: tremors caused by human activity, not by natural faults. From the early nineteen-nineties the quakes multiplied, and in 2012 one of magnitude 3.6 near Huizinge, the strongest recorded in the region, set off every alarm. Although these are moderate tremors by world standards, they occur very close to the surface and in an area not built for them, so they damaged thousands of houses, cracked walls, left homes unsafe and produced years of distress, forced relocations and a long, frustrating fight by residents to get repairs and compensation.
Social and political pressure eventually prevailed over economic interests. The Dutch government decided to close the field: production was cut year after year and stopped definitively on 1 October 2023, and in 2024 the closure was formalised in law, even in the middle of the European energy crisis. For many people in Groningen it was a bittersweet victory, because the damage was already done and the repairs are still under way. The story of the gas is today part of the province's identity: the dark side of a national prosperity that some northern communities paid for with the cracks in their own walls.