Utrecht: things to do worth your time

The oldest municipal museum in the Netherlands, holding the world's largest Rietveld collection, the Utrecht Caravaggisti and a thousand-year-old boat dug out of the city's own soil.

A museum of self-playing musical instruments in a medieval church, where every guided tour ends with a street organ shaking the room and a mechanical bird singing in your ear.

The only building on the UNESCO World Heritage list designed entirely on De Stijl principles — a 1924 house whose upper floor has no fixed walls, visited in groups of a dozen.

The national railway museum in a restored 1874 station, where sixty locomotives, four themed ride-through worlds and a royal train fill a whole afternoon and a shuttle train brings you there.

An hour underground beneath Domplein with a torch, walking on the Roman fort of Traiectum and the foundations of the cathedral nave that a tornado flattened in 1674.

The national collection of Christian art and culture, housed in a genuine medieval convent with a cloister garden, medieval sculpture and paintings by Rembrandt and Frans Hals.

A sixteenth-century artillery bastion turned observatory, where Dutch meteorology was born in 1854 and Friday evenings still end with an eye pressed to a Victorian telescope.

Utrecht eats here on Saturdays — a working city market of cheese wheels, herring, stroopwafels and flowers on the square, with a dedicated organic market taking the same ground on Fridays.

Utrecht's Saturday-morning fabric market, trading remnants, buttons and bolts of cloth on the same narrow street since the nineteenth century — the most quietly local thing in the city centre.

Saturday mornings under the lime trees, when a medieval church square turns into a wall of tulips, hydrangeas, herbs and garden plants at prices that make Amsterdam look silly.

The last farmhouse cheese market in the Netherlands still trading on the old handshake system, held on summer Saturday mornings in a small Utrecht-province town half an hour from the city.

The tallest church tower in the Netherlands at 112 metres, 465 steps up to a view over four provinces, and a cathedral choir standing free of charge where the nave used to be.

The largest castle in the Netherlands, rebuilt from a ruin between 1892 and 1912 by Pierre Cuypers with Rothschild money, standing in a moat and a hundred hectares of parkland and ancient oak.

A medieval castle on the river Vecht, home of the writer Belle van Zuylen, with a rare serpentine garden wall that ripens fruit two weeks early.

Utrecht Oost laid out its grandest green room in 1898 and barely changed it since: a curving pond, hundred-year-old planes and the city's most civilised Sunday stroll, all of it free and five minutes from the Rietveld Schroder House.

Utrecht built a park on top of one of the worst polluted sites in the Netherlands, sealed the gasworks poison in a concrete tank and put a petting farm, a legendary skate bowl and a water playground on the lid — the city's clearest lesson in what remediation actually looks like.

Three hundred hectares of new landscape west of the city: a six-kilometre pergola ring, a Piet Oudolf perennial garden that peaks in September, and a reconstructed Roman fort with a real ship inside — the clearest proof that Utrecht builds nature into its suburbs rather than around them.

An ice-age ridge of sand and pine running southeast from Utrecht, with heath, drift sand, red deer, a Napoleonic pyramid and the province's only real hills — the closest thing to wilderness within half an hour of the Dom.

The walk every Utrechter does on Sunday: three linked country estates of ancient beech, oak and the meandering Kromme Rijn, ending at a pancake house and a waterline fort, all fifteen minutes by bike from the cathedral.

Twenty-five square kilometres of water left behind by four centuries of peat digging: the sailing capital of the central Netherlands, with reed islands, Natura 2000 marsh, swimming beaches and a fleet of rental sloops half an hour north of Utrecht.

Beer brewed inside a thirteenth-century stone city castle on the Oudegracht, with copper kettles behind glass, a wharf-cellar dining room and a canal terrace below street level.

Utrecht's temple to Belgian beer on the Oudegracht: hundreds of bottles, a wall of taps, no music, correct glassware, and a wharf terrace on the water below.

Utrecht's certified-organic brewery, brewing with regional barley and hops in a converted industrial hall in the Werkspoorkwartier, with a taproom, tours and tastings.