Bloemenmarkt

Why is it significant?

Let the colours hit you first: buckets of tulips, paper bags of bulbs, armfuls of sunflowers, all crowded into a row of stalls with their backs to the canal. Peek behind them and you will see that many of these shops are not standing on the street at all. They float.

Key Facts

Listen · 2:21

Let the colours hit you first: buckets of tulips, paper bags of bulbs, armfuls of sunflowers, all crowded into a row of stalls with their backs to the canal. Peek behind them and you will see that many of these shops are not standing on the street at all. They float. Flowers have been sold along this stretch of the Singel since the second half of the nineteenth century. In those days growers sailed their plants into the city from the nurseries outside and sold them straight off the boats. The boats stopped travelling long ago, but the stalls kept their feet in the water, which is why this is still called the floating flower market. And of course, this city once lost its mind over flowers. In the 1630s tulip bulbs, especially the rare striped and flamed varieties, became objects of feverish speculation. People traded them on paper in taverns, often for bulbs still sleeping underground. The story goes that a single bulb of the most famous variety, Semper Augustus, was worth as much as a fine house. Then, in February 1637, the market simply collapsed. Historians still argue about how many people were truly ruined, and some think the legend has grown bigger than the crash. But the obsession left a far more lasting legacy on canvas. Dutch painters turned flowers into one of the great subjects of European art. Look closely at a flower still life in the Rijksmuseum and you will often find tulips, roses, irises and lilies blooming together, flowers that in real life open months apart. The painters built these impossible bouquets from studies made season by season. One of the finest of them was a woman, Rachel Ruysch, who was famous across Europe, raised ten children and was still painting in her eighties. Before you leave, notice the tower rising at the end of the market, with its clock faces and its slender open spire. Walk towards it, to the busy junction of bridges and tramlines called Muntplein.