Almere
Almere is a city that began as a lake. The land it stands on was still water in 1959, drained from the IJsselmeer over nearly a decade, and the first house wasn't built until 1976. That origin shows — not as a flaw, but as an architectural dare. Within a single square kilometre of city centre you'll find buildings by Rem Koolhaas, Herman Hertzberger and René van Zuuk, all working on a blank canvas that older Dutch cities could never offer.
Koolhaas designed the centre itself on two levels: cars below, pedestrians walking an elevated plane above. On the edge of Weerwater lake, the Kunstlinie arts centre by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa appears to sit on the water's surface. Almere doesn't ask you to imagine what it once was — it has no once.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to rent an electric sloop from the Esplanade jetty and spend a morning on the water — roughly half the city is canals and lakes, and the skyline reads differently from a boat. The Rode Donders towers, three red residential blocks by Liesbeth van der Pol referencing grain silos, are worth finding on foot in Almere Buiten.
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Book directly at the providerHow Almere came to be
The name Almere reaches back to an early medieval lake that eventually became the Zuiderzee. The modern city has no such age. A government decision in 1971 set out to relieve Amsterdam's housing pressure by building on newly reclaimed Flevoland polder — land that had been IJsselmeer seabed until drainage works completed in 1968. The first house went up in 1976. Almere became a municipality in 1984, and Flevoland was formally established as a province in 1985.
The first permanent public building, City Hall, was completed in 1986. Within a decade, the city was hosting the 1992 BouwRai construction exhibition, which produced Filmwijk — a residential district laid out in a semicircle meant to echo a film reel. Almere is, in the most literal sense, a planned experiment that people moved into while it was still being designed.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
See Almere in motion
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
May through September sits between 18 and 23°C, with occasional spikes above 33°C in summer and the wettest month falling in August. Winters are genuinely cold — February nights drop to around 2°C — with reliable frost and occasional snow.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.