5 Reasons to Visit Haarlem in the Netherlands

Haarlem is a small city about 30 kms west of Amsterdam. It is such a charming place that we instantly loved! It’s close proximity to Amsterdam makes it a really great place to stay while still being close to everything in downtown Amsterdam. Here are 5 reasons to visit Haarlem in the Netherlands to hopefully convince you to visit this beautiful spot!

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Haarlem has beautiful houses and charming streets to wander along and explore. We loved our time there so much we knew even before we left that we wanted to go back! A friend recommended to us to stay in Haarlem and we are so glad that we did! Otherwise we would have totally missed this amazing city!

Getting to Haarlem

It is really easy to get to Haarlem by train. There is a train station in the city from which you can then walk to wherever you are staying in the city. From the Haarlem train station you can get to Amsterdam Centraal in about 15 minutes. By train you can get to Brussels, Belgium or Cologne, Germany in about 3 hours. We traveled all throughout Europe using our Eurail Global Train Passes and had such a great experience! Trains in Europe are so easy to understand and are so much more convenient than constantly flying!

1. Haarlem is So Beautiful!

Haarlem is a quintessential city in the Netherlands. It has cobblestone streets filled with traditional Dutch houses that are so beautiful! The “Gingerbread Houses” are famous in Amsterdam because of the architecture and location along the canal. You can see so many houses just like those in Haarlem with so many less people!

You will pass countless people riding their bikes, rain or shine, along the designated bike paths. The bike culture in the Netherlands is so amazing! Literally everyone rides their bikes to get around and it’s amazing to see the bike parking lots. It also makes the city so quiet compared to most other cities we visited in Europe!

Just walking around Haarlem was so much fun. There are so many pretty streets to walk down that you could spend an entire day just wandering around. We walked around early in the morning and it was so cool to see the city come alive. Deliveries coming to the shops and restaurants and people on their bikes going about their day. It’s just one of those places that made us feel really good being there!

It is such a photogenic place! We made sure to always bring our our camera with us because it’s just such a photogenic place!

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2. You Can Get to Amsterdam in 15 Minutes

Haarlem is located only about 30 kilometers west of Amsterdam. It takes about 30 minutes if you’re driving or about 15-20 minutes if you take the train from Amsterdam Centraal to Haarlem. Because it’s so close to Amsterdam Haarlem is a really good option to stay. You can experience the city of Haarlem itself but still be close enough to take the train into Amsterdam for the day or a couple different days and explore both places. We found it was also a lot cheaper than staying in downtown Amsterdam.

It also makes it really easy to get to from other cities within Europe because Amsterdam Centraal is such a large train station. You can reach Amsterdam by train from other places within the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany or really anywhere. We actually took the train from Prague, Czech Republic to Amsterdam. It was a long day of traveling but it was pretty easy because we could take the train to Amsterdam and then out to Haarlem is just a few more minutes.

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3. There Are So Many Restaurants and Cafes

The center of the city has so many restaurants and shops. We loved how much there was to do while it still felt really quaint! You could easily spend a few days going in and out of all of the shops and cafes in Haarlem. Plus there are plenty of restaurants so you definitely have options for whatever you could want to eat!

We got coffee at Brownies and Downies Haarlem on a rainy afternoon and loved it. It has such a great mission and is definitely a place to visit in the center of Haarlem! Even in cooler weather all the restaurants have outdoor seating with outdoor heaters and tons of people sitting outside. If you’re craving a hamburger try Thrill Grill which is in such a good location in the middle of the main square!

If you’re visiting in the fall like we did it can get chilly. As you can see from the pictures we had rain showers that came throughout the day. We threw our rain jackets into our daypack and were glad to have them!

4. It’s Cheaper Than Staying in Amsterdam

While planning our time in the Netherlands we actually debated cutting it out entirely because we were having trouble finding reasonably priced accommodations. We are so glad we didn’t though because we fell in love with the culture of the Netherlands! The Dutch architecture is so beautiful and the food is amazing.

Staying in the center of Amsterdam can be really expensive just because of how popular Amsterdam is with visitors. Accommodations were cheaper in Haarlem than in downtown Amsterdam. So not only did we save money while staying in Haarlem but we also got to experience another place that we ended up loving!

In general we found accommodation options in the Netherlands to be pricey no matter where we looked. But we did spend less money to stay in Haarlem in an Airbnb with our own kitchen compared to a not very nice hotel room in the center of Amsterdam.

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5. Haarlem has the Best French Fries

One of the ways we find affordable places to eat while traveling is by looking through the Cheap Eats section on TripAdvisor. There you can look through inexpensive restaurants and find ones closest to you. If you’re traveling on a budget this is a great way to keep your food costs down when you don’t have access to a kitchen!

The number one restaurant for Haarlem was Frietkamer and we 100% understand why! Seriously they are the best french fries we have ever had. We liked these ones better than the ones we had in Belgium (known for their French fries) and literally anywhere else in the world. It’s a tiny shop that sells pretty much only French fries. They cook them to order and have a bunch of different sauce options to choose from. They are crispy and cooked to perfection! We especially loved their special sauce!

We both love French fries (clearly) and still talk about how good the ones from Frietkamer are. Seriously if you like French fries this is enough of a reason to visit Haarlem!
In the Netherlands and Belgium you pay for the French fries and then pay for the sauce separately. It’s not really the cheapest meal (even though we found it by looking for Cheap Eats) but it is SO worth it!

Hopefully we have convinced you to visit this amazing place! It’s somewhere we wouldn’t have gone to had it not been recommended to us. But we knew after walking from the train station to our Airbnb in the dark that we were going to love it! We can see ourselves going back and spending a lot longer there. It just had such a cool feel to it and we can’t wait to visit in the warm weather!