Qualla: Westhove Castle

Westhove Castle: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Benutzer "maggikochstudio", Public domain. You can spend the night at Westhove Castle for the price of a hostel bunk. The thirteenth-century walls that once housed counts and emperors, that were burned by a Sea Beggar in 1572, and that received the thirteen-year-old Queen Wilhelmina in 1894, now host backpackers and school groups under the StayOkay name. There is something very Dutch about the arrangement — a national monument repurposed not as an austere museum but as a working building. The dunes outside have not changed since Charles V was here as a child in 1505. The price of a bed has.

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Image: Benutzer "maggikochstudio" | Public domain

Westhove Castle: Property of the Abbey

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul 14, CC BY-SA 4.0. Westhove first appears in writing in 1277, in a charter from Count Floris V of Holland confirming the castle as the property of the powerful Premonstratensian abbey at Middelburg. How old the building was even then is not certain — the charter recognises something that already ex...

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Image: Paul 14 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Westhove Castle: The Guest Book

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TeunSpaans at Dutch Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The list of people received at Westhove reads like a sampling of the Burgundian-Habsburg ascendancy. Charles the Bold came. So did the Count and Countess of Charolais in 1460. Philip the Fair of Austria stayed with his wife in 1500. Their five-year-old son visited in 1505, came b...

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Image: TeunSpaans at Dutch Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Westhove Castle: The Sea Beggar's Fire

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mz, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1559 Middelburg became a bishop's see, and from then until 1572 a bishop ran Westhove. That run ended badly. The Eighty Years' War was on. The Siege of Middelburg pitted Spanish defenders against the watergeuzen, the Sea Beggars — Dutch Calvinist privateers who fought their wa...

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Image: Mz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Westhove Castle: Private Hands and a Weather Vane

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bodoklecksel, CC BY-SA 3.0. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Westhove passed from one Zeeland family to another, gathering the small details that turn a fortified house into a country estate. The Boreels — Jacob and his son Willem (1591–1668), ambassador to France — held it for a time. Then...

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Image: Bodoklecksel | CC BY-SA 3.0

Westhove Castle: From Convalescent Home to Hostel

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit G.Th. Delemarre, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1880 Judge Jacques Phoenix Boddaert of Middelburg, who had bought the estate and lavished maintenance on it, sold Westhove to his sister, who in 1899 reopened it as a convalescent home — a Dutch sanatorium for patients sent to recover in the sea air. The dunes of Walcheren and...

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Image: G.Th. Delemarre | CC BY-SA 4.0