Tour of Alphen aan den Rijn

You will cycle through the middle of the Groene Hart, a typical Dutch polder landscape with windmills, farms, pollard willows and groves, surrounded by lots and lots of water: ditches, rivers, canals and lakes.

Boskoop is located on both banks of the Gouwe and is connected by the Boskoop lift bridge, which occupies a prominent place in Boskoop's streetscape due to its height. The floor of the bridge can be raised upright. Once you have crossed the bridge, you will soon be cycling through the unusual landscape around Boskoop.

The municipality is nationally and internationally known for its tree nurseries. More than 750 tree nurseries are spread over an area of 1100 hectares. Traditionally, the soil under Boskoop is particularly suitable for tree cultivation. For centuries, Boskoop has mainly focused on the cultivation of fruit and fruit trees (especially apples). It is not for nothing that the name of the municipality is given to a variety of apple that is widely distributed in the Low Countries: the beautiful van Boskoop (also known as the golden reinette). Already in the Middle Ages, about 2000 kilometers of ditches had been constructed in the municipality, with elongated islands in between, often only about 15 meters wide. This was necessary for the drainage of the nurseries, but also for the transport of the trees. The latter was done with so-called mantelpieces, wooden boats, which you can still see sailing, but then because they are used for tourist tours. Over time, ditches were filled in again and lands merged, but much of the characteristic landscape, of islands with waterways, has been preserved. Boskoop is therefore also sometimes referred to as `Little Giethoorn\\\'.

Up to Hazerswoude-Dorp you can enjoy the polder land with the neat nursery plots, waterways, bridges and windmills that drained the polder, such as the Rietveldsemolen and the Blauwe Wip. The Nieuw Leven windmill in the center of Hazerswoude-Dorp used to be a polder mill, but was later converted into a corn mill.

South of Hazerswoude-Dorp and east of Benthuizen, a lot of peat used to be cut, creating large peat lakes. After reclamation, the lands were reclaimed in the 19th century. In Waddinxveen you cross the Gouwe again via the Waddinxveense lifting bridge, a similar bridge as the one in Boskoop. On the way back to the starting location you will find even more of the archipelago with the many tree nurseries of Boskoop. A nice detail is that all sizes in the Boskoop nursery area are still plotted in the Rijnlandse rod, an old Dutch measure of length of 3.76 metres, or 14.19 square metres. This applies, for example, to the size of a nursery and the planting distance between avenue trees. The width of the countless islands is also based on the Rhineland rod.