The Dutch year has one day when the whole country dresses in orange and anyone may sell anything on the pavement, one summer weekend when Rotterdam dances to Caribbean drums, and one Sunday in September when twenty hamlets in a Brabant village push nine-metre floats of dahlias through the streets by hand.
Photo: Remi Mathis, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Two of the three festivals in this atlas are on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and both were inscribed recently: corso culture, the flower and fruit parades, in 2021, and the Rotterdam Summer Carnival in 2023. The corso file covers some thirty parades and around seventy-five thousand volunteers — the spring bulb processions of the tulip country, the autumn dahlia corsos of Brabant and Limburg, and the fruit corso of Tiel. This atlas begins with Zundert, the largest of them.
The third is the national day. King's Day is the king's birthday, and it is kept as a birthday rather than as a ceremony of state: the royal family spends the day in one town, chosen a year in advance, and the rest of the country holds a vrijmarkt, a free market on the pavement where anyone may sell anything without a permit. It is the one day in the Dutch calendar when the rules about trading are simply suspended.
Koningsdag
The Netherlands celebrates the king's birthday by dressing in orange and holding a nationwide jumble sale. For one day anyone may sell anything on the pavement without a permit, children put blankets down in the street, and in Amsterdam the canals fill with boats.
April 27, 2027Officially announced
Zomercarnaval
On the last Saturday of July, Rotterdam holds a Caribbean carnival in a Dutch city. Costumed groups and sound trucks take the centre for the street parade, and around a million people come to watch a festival that the Netherlands put on UNESCO's list in 2023.
July 31, 2027Calculated
Bloemencorso Zundert
Twenty hamlets of one Brabant village spend a year building floats up to nine metres high and nineteen long, cover them in dahlias grown for the purpose, and push them through the streets by hand on the first Sunday of September. Around eight million flowers are used, and the hamlets are competing.
September 5 – 6, 2027Calculated