Zaanse Schans is about twenty minutes from Amsterdam Centraal by train, which makes it the easiest day trip in the Netherlands and the one most people get slightly wrong. The windmills take a morning, not a day. This plan uses the rest of the day for Volendam, Marken and Edam, the old fishing and cheese towns on the other side of the city.
It suits anyone with one spare day who wants the postcard version of Holland without hiring a car, and no journey on it is longer than about forty five minutes.
Is it worth a day trip?
Zaanse Schans is an open air heritage village, assembled from buildings moved here from around the Zaan region, and it is honest about that. The mills are real and working, the river setting is genuinely handsome, and by eleven in the morning it is busy. Go early and the first hour is close to empty.
Two hours there is enough for most people. Stop at that and you are back in Amsterdam for lunch with the afternoon free, which is a perfectly good version of this day.
The reason to keep going is contrast. Volendam and Marken are the working waterfront that Zaanse Schans is a museum of, and Edam is a small brick town that most coach tours skip. If you would rather spend the afternoon in Haarlem or the Rijksmuseum, do that instead and treat the windmills as a half day.
Skip the Waterland half if you are travelling with someone who tires easily, because the afternoon involves several bus changes and a fair amount of standing about at stops.
Getting there
The simplest route is the NS train from Amsterdam Centraal to Zaandijk Zaanse Schans, around seventeen minutes, then a ten minute walk across the river bridge. Trains are frequent all day and tickets come from ns.nl or the machines at the station.
Bus 391 also runs directly from the IJ side of Amsterdam Centraal, behind the station and one level up, taking roughly three quarters of an hour. It is slower than the train but drops you at the site entrance.
For the afternoon you head back towards Amsterdam and out again on the eastern side. Bus 316 runs from the same IJ side bus station to Volendam in about forty five minutes. From Volendam, the Marken Express ferry crosses to Marken in roughly half an hour in season, and bus 315 does the same job by land through Broek in Waterland when it is not running. Bus 316 links Volendam and Edam in about ten minutes.
One regional travel ticket covering Amsterdam and the surrounding area usually beats buying each leg, and it covers the train and the regional buses. Check the current options before you travel.
The day, hour by hour
09:30 Zaanse Schans. There is no charge to walk into the village itself, only for the individual mills and museums, so you can wander the green painted houses and the riverside path freely. Start on the dyke path with the mills on your right and the Zaan on your left, in the hour when you will get photographs without other people in them.
10:00 De Kat. A working paint mill, grinding pigment from raw mineral the way the trade did here for centuries, and the only one of its kind still working. You climb inside past the turning gears to a narrow gallery around the cap, and the shop sells the pigments it makes.
11:00 Zaans Museum. The museum that explains what you have been looking at: why hundreds of mills stood along this river, what they sawed, pressed and ground, and how the region industrialised early. It also houses the Verkade pavilion, devoted to the biscuit and chocolate factory that employed much of the area.
12:00 Catharina Hoeve. A reconstructed cheese farm where the Gouda and Edam wheels are stacked to the ceiling and there is a counter of samples to work along. Someone will demonstrate the making, briefly and cheerfully. Buy the aged one, not the young one.
13:30 Volendam. A former fishing village on the old Zuiderzee, now a long harbour front of eel stalls, fish stands and terraces facing the water. It is unashamedly touristic and still pleasant, especially if you eat here. The photo studios that dress visitors in traditional Volendam costume have been trading for well over a century.
15:00 Marken. A former island, joined to the mainland by a causeway in the middle of the last century, and much quieter than Volendam. The houses stand on mounds or piles against flooding, painted dark green with white trim, packed along narrow lanes.
16:30 Edam. The town the cheese is named after, and the best looking of the three: canals, a weigh house, a lopsided tower and almost no crowds by this hour. The cheese market runs on summer mornings only, so an afternoon here is about the streets rather than the trade.
What to book ahead
Very little. The village is open ground and the buses do not take reservations. If you want the combined card covering the museum and a choice of mills, buy it online the night before.
Open this day trip in Tralendr
The plan is already built with every stop in order and on a map. Open the Zaanse Schans day trip from Amsterdam in Tralendr and it loads without an account. Cut the afternoon to a half day, reorder the Waterland towns, or send the link to whoever is coming with you.
For deciding how much to fit in, see how to plan a day trip and planning a day trip with an assistant, or browse all our day trips.