Tour of Voorne

During your tour of Voorne you will pass through a beautiful wooded area and nice places that are worth exploring by bike. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, a fortified town was built to strengthen the existing port. Hellevoetsluis grew until the nineteenth century due to the importance of the port town, but when the port of Rotterdam was opened up around 1830 by the construction of a canal, activity in Hellevoetsluis decreased. The town suffered a heavy blow during the Second World War, when the Germans demolished a large part of it to improve their field of fire. After the war, a lot of work was done to give Hellevoetsluis its old allure back. In 1960, the three municipalities of Hellevoetsluis, Nieuw-Helvoet and Nieuwenhoorn were merged into one new, large municipality and in the years that followed, Hellevoetsluis grew. The port influences are still clearly noticeable. Its commercial importance has diminished, but the port has regained a strong recreational value.

Cycling along the banks of the Oostvoornse lake you can look out over an industrial area that is unprecedented. The petrochemical industry blows impressive clouds of smoke into the air here. The Oostvoornse lake was created when the Brielse Gat was constructed in 1966, which caused a separation from the North Sea. Although there are not many fish in the lake, you can find three-spined stickleback, eel, turbot, bullheads, bullheads, eelpout, cockles, shore clams, trout species and herring. Anyone who takes a look underwater will encounter shipwrecks, because the Oostvoorne lake is a true ship cemetery due to a sandbank that used to be there.