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 Boskoopse lifting bridge, which, due to its height, occupies a prominent place in the street scene of Boskoop. The floor of the bridge can be moved upright. Once you have crossed the bridge, you will soon cycle through the special 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 1,100 hectares. Traditionally, the soil under Boskoop has been particularly suitable for tree cultivation. For centuries, Boskoop has mainly focused on the cultivation of fruit and fruit trees (particularly apples). It is not without reason that the name of the municipality is given to an apple variety that is widely distributed in the Low Countries: the beautiful van Boskoop (also known as the gold reinette). Already in the Middle Ages, approximately 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 happened with so-called scows, wooden boats, which you still see sailing, but because they are used for tourist tours. Over time, ditches were filled in and farmlands merged, but much of the characteristic landscape, of islands with waterways, has been preserved. Boskoop is therefore sometimes called 'Klein Giethoorn\\\'.

Up to Hazerswoude-Dorp you can enjoy the polder land with the neat tree nursery plots, waters, (draw) bridges and mills that drained the polder, such as the Rietveldsemolen and the Blauwe Wip. The Nieuw Leven mill in the center of Hazerswoude-Dorp used to be a polder mill but was later converted into a flour mill.

South of Hazerswoude-Dorp and east of Benthuizen, a lot of peat used to be cut, creating large peat ponds. After reclamation, the lands were reclaimed in the 19th century. In Waddinxveen you cross the Gouwe again via the Waddinxveense vertical lift bridge, a similar type of bridge to 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 length measure of 3.76 meters, or 14.19 square meters. This applies, for example, to the size of a nursery and the planting distance between avenue trees. The width of the numerous islets is also based on the Rhineland rod.