Queen Wilhelmina Route

This cycle tour goes straight through the Crown Estates. Queen Wilhelmina often settled in this area to paint. She painted from the mobile painting studio, "the painting truck", which she had set up in various places in the vicinity of Paleis Het Loo (Het Oude Loo). Het Loo Palace was built in 1686 by order of stadtholder Prince Willem III and served as a hunting lodge and summer residence for members of the Orange Nassau dynasty, the current Dutch Royal House, until 1970. Queen Wilhelmina died there in 1962. After a thorough restoration, the palace and gardens have been returned to their seventeenth-century state and have been open to the public since 1984. At junction 86 you cycle past the Visitor Center and Staverden Castle. Count Reinald van Gelre founded a settlement on the northern Veluwe, not far from Harderwijk, around 1300. The settlement should have grown into a city, but the location was apparently not suitable for this. It never became more than a castle and some farms around it and that's fortunate, because it is now a very beautiful area that is worth seeing. Near Uddel, just past junction 61, there is a so-called Hunnenschans. It was built in the 9th or 10th century and is one of the most important archaeological monuments in the Netherlands. The Hunnenschans is a castle that consists of a courtyard and a thirty-meter-wide wall that is four meters above ground level. Het Aardhuis is located elsewhere in the Crown Estates. The Aardhuis, the old hunting chalet of King Willem III, was built in 1861 at almost the highest point of the Veluwe (+ 102 m NAP). Het Aardhuis is surrounded by a wildlife park, where you are guaranteed to see wild boars and/or red deer. © This cycle route is offered to you by the Veluws Tourist Office. For more information about this region, visit www.develuwe.nl