2025 Europe – Day 3 – The Hague

We woke up to a grey day in Rotterdam this morning and were confronted with some misty rain as we left our room for breakfast, which prompted a quick detour to collect our wet weather jackets. Ultimately, these were unnecessary, so I do hope my jacket enjoyed it’s day out being carried, rather than worn.

We planned to travel to The Hague today, so found another coffee shop close to the railway station for a coffee and a ham and cheese toastie. We have found the rail system here to be very efficient. The Rotterdam and Delft staions are both modern and easy to navigate, not so impressed with The Hague station though. The only downside being that you need 20 Euros on your card before you get on a train, so sometimes (like this morning) you find you have to top up your card. I think you may be able to use a debit card on some services, but it isn’t really clear whether that would work with all the different transit companies.

Once we arrived in the Hague, our first stop was is an art museum called the Mauritshaus. The museum houses the Royal Cabinet of Paintings which consists of 854 objects, mostly famous Dutch paintings by Vermeer and Rembrandt and their contemporaries. The museum building was built in 1641 and has operated as an art gallery since 1773. For us art lovers the collection is significant and it was great to see the real Vermeer works that we saw copies of in Delft.

The building itself is divided into many rooms for the the works which didn’t seem to fit any particular theme. The rooms themselves are well decorated to give a great feel for the time periods.

Our plan was to see the Binnenhof Buildings that are housed next door, but that was completely closed off for renovations. These normally house much of the machinery of government and are where the dutch parliament sits. While a disappointment, that is the nature of traveling, so in a complete change of gears, we then headed to ‘The Passage’, which is the oldest surviving shopping centre in the Netherlands which opened in 1885. To me it looked a bit like the Galleria in Milan, which had opened some twenty years earlier.

Our next stop was the Grote Kerk (Great Church) which is a landmark protestant church, so named for its high tower. Many members of the dutch royal families have been baptised and married there. The church itself dates back to the mid 1300s. It is no longer commonly used for routine church services and is often rented out for concerts with the funds being reinvested in repairs and restorations. Its stained glass windows and timber ceilings are spectacular.

We then walked some more, (possibly more than we had expected) to the Peace Palace, an international law administrative building, most famously housing the International Court of Justice (the principal judicial body of the UN). The palace officially opened on 28 August 1913 and the European Heritage Layer was awarded to the Peace Palace on 8 April 2014. It is an imposing building, although on reflection, many of the functions and decisions performed here have little practical impact.

Our last stop was Panorama Mesdag, which is a panorama  by Hendrik Mesdag and his wife Sientje Mesdag in 1881 that is housed in a purpose-built museum. The panorama is a cylindrical painting that is more than 14 metres high and about 40 metres in diameter. From an observation gallery in the centre of the room the cylindrical perspective creates the illusion that the viewer is on a high sand dune overlooking the sea and beaches near the village of Scheveningen in the late 19th century. A foreground of fake terrain around the viewing gallery hides the base of the painting coupled with the sound track of familiar beach noises makes the illusion more convincing. Below are a couple of images I snapped.

While there were a number of these panoramas produced at the time, this one is the only known one surviving in it’s original location.

It was then only a train trip back to Rotterdam to rest up for another day.

Until tomorrow!