Things to do in 's-Hertogenbosch

Landmark · Parade, Binnenstad

The most elaborate Gothic church in the Netherlands, built in Brabantine Gothic over three centuries, with around a hundred stone figures riding the flying buttresses.

Local tip: The buttress figures are the thing — musicians, craftsmen and grotesques climbing towards the roof, including a twenty-first-century addition of an angel with a mobile phone. Take the lift up the tower on a clear day, and come to the Parade in summer when the square becomes an open-air theatre festival.

Culture · Under the Binnenstad

The medieval river system that was built over as the city grew, restored from the 1970s and now navigable by low flat-bottomed boats through tunnels and cellars.

Local tip: Book the boat rather than turning up — it sells out from spring onward. Ask for the longer route rather than the standard loop, and note that the boatmen are volunteers who mostly know the city better than any guidebook does.

Culture · Verwersstraat

Two connected museums in a former governor's palace — Brabant's art and history, and a design collection, in the city that produced Jheronimus Bosch.

Local tip: The honest local fact is that the city which produced Bosch owns almost none of his work; the paintings are in Madrid, Vienna and Lisbon. The 2016 anniversary exhibition briefly reversed that and is still talked about. The Jheronimus Bosch Art Center in a converted church shows full-size reproductions of everything, which sounds like a consolation prize and is genuinely useful.

Nature · Immediately south of the walls

An empty floodplain kept deliberately undeveloped as water storage, giving an unbroken view back to the cathedral across open meadow.

Local tip: Walk out along the Zuiderplas and the old bastion walls at dusk — it is five minutes from the Parade and feels like open country. It floods properly in a wet winter, which is the entire point of it, and the paths close when it does.

Food · Binnenstad, south-east

A former island district of narrow lanes, and the short street that holds more restaurants per metre than anywhere in the southern Netherlands.

Local tip: The Korte Putstraat is where the city eats out and it is genuinely good rather than a tourist trap — book on a Friday. For the Bossche bol, the argument between Jan de Groot and the smaller bakeries is a live one; try both and pick a side, because you will be asked.

Nature · South and west, 15-25 minutes out

Heath and pine on one side, and a genuine inland sand desert on the other — a drifting dune landscape locals call the Brabant Sahara.

Local tip: The dunes are best on a weekday morning before the sand gets busy, and the ride out through Vught and Helvoirt is flat and easy. Camp Vught, the only SS concentration camp in western Europe outside Germany, is on the same route and is a national memorial — it is not a detour to make casually, but it is part of understanding where you have moved to.