Rotterdam

Rotterdam's centre is a free permanent exhibition of post-war and contemporary architecture. Piet Blom's Cube Houses (1984) — yellow cubes tilted 45 degrees on concrete stems — remain the most photographed; one is kept open as a show home. Across the street, the Markthal (2014) arches a horseshoe of apartments over a food market, its inner vault covered by the Horn of Plenty, one of the largest artworks in the world. The Erasmus Bridge — 'the Swan' — gives the skyline its signature line, best seen lit at night from the Maas embankments. Rotterdam Centraal's angular steel point, the stacked towers of De Rotterdam on the Wilhelminapier, the pencil-shaped Pencil Tower and the white cable-stayed Willemsbrug fill out a skyline the Dutch themselves call Manhattan aan de Maas. The Euromast (1960) adds the overview: 185 metres, with an open platform and views over the port to the sea on clear days.

The Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen is Rotterdam's boldest cultural statement: a 40-metre mirror-clad bowl in the Museumpark holding the entire 150,000-piece collection of the Boijmans museum in open storage — visitors wander the racks and climbing atrium crisscrossed by stairways, watching restorers at work, while the museum's main building undergoes its long renovation. Bruegel, Bosch, Rembrandt, Dalí and Magritte sit in the racks alongside design and decorative arts. Around the Museumpark: the Kunsthal (Rem Koolhaas's exhibition machine, with a constantly rotating programme), the relaunched Nieuwe Instituut for architecture and design, and the Chabot Museum's expressionists in a white modernist villa. The Maritime Museum by the old Leuvehaven harbour keeps the city's seafaring core honest, with historic vessels moored outside, and the wider harbour quarter shows the few pre-war survivors — the White House of 1898, briefly Europe's tallest office building, among them.

The Port of Rotterdam handles more cargo than any other in Europe, stretching some forty kilometres from the city centre to the Maasvlakte's deep-sea terminals on the North Sea. It is genuinely visitable: Spido harbour cruises leave from the Erasmus Bridge for a 75-minute loop past the shipyards, container terminals and dry docks; longer summer sailings reach the refinery and windmill-lined outer basins. At the seaward end, the FutureLand information centre on Maasvlakte 2 — the land-reclamation extension that pushed the Netherlands further into the North Sea — explains the robotised container terminals, with terminal-viewing tours and a beach beside the dunes where ships the length of four football pitches slide past. The SS Rotterdam, the former Holland America Line flagship, is permanently moored at Katendrecht as a hotel and museum ship — her engine-room and bridge tours are the best way to feel the ocean-liner era.

The southern bank of the Maas tells Rotterdam's human history. The Wilhelminapier was the Holland America Line's home quay: between 1873 and the 1960s, around a million Europeans sailed from here for the New World, and the line's brick headquarters now houses Hotel New York — its café one of the city's institutions, reached most enjoyably by the little aqua-liner ferry. The Fenix, in a converted 1923 warehouse on Katendrecht across the Rijnhaven, is a museum devoted to migration in both directions — departure and arrival — crowned by the Tornado, a double-helix staircase of polished steel that climbs out of the roof to overlook the quays where the journeys began. Katendrecht itself, once the sailors' quarter and Europe's first Chinatown, is now one of the city's liveliest corners: the Fenix Food Factory's craft-food warehouse, the Deliplein's restaurants and theatre, and the SS Rotterdam at the pier's end.

Rotterdam's food scene runs on diversity and warehouse-scale conversions. The Markthal gathers a hundred stalls and counters under its painted vault — Dutch cheese and stroopwafels next to Spanish, Vietnamese and Levantine counters. The Fenix Food Factory on Katendrecht keeps it craft: bakers, brewers, a cider maker and harbour-view benches in a raw warehouse. Witte de Withstraat is the night-out street — galleries, bars and kitchens shoulder to shoulder between the Museumpark and the harbour — while the Oude Haven's terraces sit under the Cube Houses around the oldest harbour basin in the city. Surinamese, Cape Verdean, Turkish and Indonesian kitchens reflect the port city's 170-plus nationalities; a Rotterdam specific worth seeking out is kapsalon, the calorific shawarma-and-fries invention named after the hairdresser who first ordered it.

The nineteen windmills of Kinderdijk — the country's most famous UNESCO site after the canals — stand in polder land half an hour upriver, and the best approach is the waterbus from the Erasmus Bridge: a fast ferry ride through the working river landscape that beats any coach tour. Historic Delfshaven, one of the few quarters to survive 1940, preserves a slice of old Rotterdam around its small harbour — the Pilgrim Fathers' Church marks where the Pilgrims sailed for America in 1620 aboard the Speedwell, before transferring to the Mayflower. Dordrecht, the oldest city of Holland, with its intact medieval harbour quarter, and the Biesbosch national park's freshwater tidal creeks are a short train or waterbus ride further. Westward, the beach at Hoek van Holland — where the river mouth meets the North Sea — is reachable on the metro, ending a city-of-water day with ships entering Europe's busiest waterway at arm's length.