🇳🇱 Netherlands · Amsterdam and around
Volendam is postcard Holland in village form: a fishing harbour on the shore of an inland sea, with its dike lined with little wooden houses, its moored boats, the smell of smoked fish and fresh herring, and a tradition of folk costume that is still alive in its festivals and in souvenir photographs. Only half an hour from Amsterdam, it is one of the country's best-loved and most photogenic escapes.
Founded as a fishing hamlet, Volendam spent centuries facing the old Zuiderzee, the great inland sea that connected to the North Sea. Herring and eel fishing shaped its life, its economy and its character. When, in the twentieth century, the Zuiderzee was closed off by a huge dike and turned into a lake, the village managed to reinvent itself around tourism while proudly keeping its identity: its costumes, its music, its seafood cooking and its warm, festive atmosphere.
This guide covers the essentials of Volendam with a practical, warm eye: its famous dike and promenade, the harbour, the fish you have to try, the tradition of folk costume and the period photograph, the village museums and, above all, the unmissable combination with the island of Marken across the water. A delicious plan for experiencing the most authentic, traditional Holland a step away from the big city.
Volendam's origins go back to the fourteenth century and are tied to neighbouring Edam: when the people of Edam built a new harbour and partly closed off their access to the sea, the old channel was left as land reclaimed from the water, and there, on the shore of the Zuiderzee, a fishing hamlet gradually formed: 'Vollendam' would mean something like 'the filled-in dam'. For centuries Volendam lived with its back to the land and its face to the sea: fishing for herring, eel and other fish in the Zuiderzee sustained the community, which developed a strongly marked culture of its own, with its folk costume, its dialect, its Catholic faith (unlike much of the Protestant Holland around it) and its customs. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Volendam became famous among artists: painters from all over Europe (Picasso even passed through) were drawn by its picturesqueness, its fishermen and its costumes. The great change came with the construction of the Afsluitdijk (1932), the enormous dike that closed off the Zuiderzee and turned it into a freshwater lake (the IJsselmeer/Markermeer), putting an end to traditional sea fishing. Volendam then redirected its economy towards tourism, preserving and proudly displaying its identity. Today it is one of the most visited villages in the Netherlands. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of the Golden Age: the city born from a dam on the river Amstel, capital of world trade and seat of the VOC, with its UNESCO-listed canal belt, its Jewish history and the Anne Frank House, and around it the windmills of the Zaanse Schans, the Haarlem of Frans Hals and the old fishing villages of the Zuiderzee.
Read the history of Amsterdam and around →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Volendam began as a humble fishing village on the shore of the Zuiderzee, the great inland sea that for centuries defined life in this part of the Netherlands. Its origins go back to the late fourteenth century: at that time the inhabitants of neighbouring Edam decided to close off with a dike the arm of water connecting their harbour with the Zuiderzee, opening a new channel straight to the sea. The old harbour was left blocked or 'filled in', and from that fact comes the name of the place itself, 'Vollendam' or 'Volle-dam', which can be understood as 'the full dam' or 'the dam that fills in the harbour'.
Around that dike a group of fishermen gradually built their wooden houses, shaping a community that lived entirely from the sea. Fishing for herring and eel in the brackish waters of the Zuiderzee became the livelihood of whole generations of volendammers. The village grew pressed tight against the dike, with its characteristic harbour, its quays and its flat-bottomed boats adapted to the shallow waters of the inland sea.
That total dependence on the sea shaped not only the economy but also Volendam's identity: a close-knit, deeply religious community with strong traditions of its own, which stayed Catholic even after much of Holland turned to Protestantism following the Reformation. That religious and cultural singularity helped preserve the village's unique character down the centuries.
If anything made Volendam famous around the world it is its traditional costume, one of the most recognisable in the whole of the Netherlands. The women's outfit includes the unmistakable 'hul', a white lace bonnet with raised points that look like two small wings, along with striped skirts, aprons and a richly decorated bodice. The men wore dark baggy trousers, a jacket and a cap, an outfit designed for life at sea and on the quay.
Unlike other places where regional dress disappeared, in Volendam the costume survived as a symbol of identity and pride, and even today some older residents wear it in daily life or at festivals. That survival, together with the picturesque image of the harbour, turned Volendam into a magnet for artists and travellers from the late nineteenth century onwards.
Out of that fascination came a tradition that is still very much alive: having your portrait taken in the folk costume at the village's photographic studios. What began when the first tourists and painters wanted a keepsake in local dress became one of Volendam's great attractions today, with thousands of visitors photographed every year kitted out as authentic Zuiderzee fishermen and village women.
In the late nineteenth century Volendam became a favourite destination for painters from all over Europe, drawn by the light of the Zuiderzee, the colourful costumes and the simple life of the fishing village. Artists arrived from the Netherlands, Germany, France, England, the United States and other countries, in what became known as the Volendam 'artists' colony'. They painted the harbour, the boats, the interiors of the houses and, above all, the inhabitants in traditional dress.
The epicentre of that artistic ferment was the Hotel Spaander, founded in 1881 by Leendert Spaander. Many painters who could not afford their stay paid for it with their work, so the hotel's walls gradually filled with paintings. Over time the Spaander built up one of the most singular art collections in the country, with hundreds of paintings that still decorate its rooms today, making it a living museum of that golden age.
It has even been said that artists of the stature of Pablo Picasso or Pierre-Auguste Renoir passed through Volendam, though these accounts are part of local tradition and should be treated with caution. What is beyond doubt is that the village left a mark on late nineteenth-century art history, and that its fame as a picturesque town, fed by the painters, laid the foundations of the tourism that sustains it today.
The event that most transformed life in Volendam in the twentieth century was one of the greatest hydraulic works in Dutch history: the closing of the Zuiderzee. In 1932 the Afsluitdijk was completed, an enormous dike some 32 kilometres long that separated the inland sea from the North Sea. With that work, the salt waters of the Zuiderzee gradually turned into the freshwater lake known today as the IJsselmeer.
For a community that lived from herring and eel fishing in salt water, the change was dramatic. Closing off the inland sea completely altered the ecosystem, wiped out the traditional fisheries and forced Volendam to reinvent itself. Many fishermen had to change trade, and the village began to look more and more towards tourism as a new source of livelihood.
Paradoxically, the very image that the closing of the Zuiderzee seemed to condemn — the harbour, the boats, the costumes, the traditional way of life — became Volendam's great asset. The village managed to preserve its heritage and turn it to account, so that fishing, no longer a central economic livelihood, survives today above all as a cultural attraction: the smokehouses and the herring and kibbeling stalls on the quay are direct heirs of that maritime tradition.
Few would imagine that a small fishing village would become a genuine breeding ground for Dutch pop stars, but that is exactly what happened in Volendam. From the middle of the twentieth century the village gave rise to a genre and a scene known as the 'Palingsound' (literally, 'the eel sound', a reference to the local fishing tradition), which became synonymous with pop and folk music made in Volendam.
Some of the most popular artists and bands in the Netherlands came out of this small community. The Cats, a band that emerged in the nineteen-sixties, achieved enormous success and is considered the origin of the Palingsound. Later came figures such as Jan Smit, BZN and numerous singers who kept the tradition alive and carried Volendam's name into the national charts. The ratio of famous musicians to inhabitants made the village an almost unique case.
That musical calling is still part of the volendammer identity and you can feel it in the bars, the festivals and the events. Music, alongside the folk costume, the harbour and the seafood cooking, completes the portrait of a village that turned its tradition and its character into a cultural brand recognisable across the country.