Zundert flower parade

A village at war with itself, politely

Zundert is a village in North Brabant, near the Belgian border, and it is divided into twenty hamlets. Each builds one float a year. Work begins in the autumn with a design, goes on through the winter as a steel and papier-mâché skeleton, and finishes in the last days of August when the flowers go on: dahlias, grown in fields by the hamlets themselves, pinned on one at a time. About eight million of them are used across the parade. The floats may be up to nine metres high and nineteen metres long — limits set in 1989, because the sizes were getting out of hand — and they are pushed and steered by hand, not driven.

The parade was founded in 1936 and is the largest dahlia corso in the world. The hamlets compete, and the result matters in Zundert for a year.

Corso culture

In 2021 UNESCO inscribed corso culture, the flower and fruit parades of the Netherlands, on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The file covers around thirty parades and some seventy-five thousand volunteers: the spring bulb corsos of the tulip country, the autumn dahlia corsos of the south, and the fruit corso of Tiel. Zundert is the biggest, not the only one.

When it happens

The parade runs on the first Sunday of September and again on the Monday, with the floats on show for several days afterwards. Zundert is about an hour from Rotterdam and half an hour from Breda; on the day itself, come by train and bus rather than by car.