Qualla: Zuid-Kennemerland National Park

Zuid-Kennemerland National Park: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jiří Komárek, CC BY-SA 4.0. The dunes of Zuid-Kennemerland do not look like wilderness on a map. They are a thin green-and-yellow band squeezed between the dense red of Haarlem and the long blue of the North Sea, with a railway threading through the middle and a parking lot at one end. But walk a hundred meters in from the Zeeweg and the city disappears. The Atlantic wind picks up sand and throws it against your jacket. Skylarks rise and fall. Somewhere over the next ridge, in an area closed to the public, a herd of European bison - reintroduced in 2007 after centuries of absence - is grazing on dune grass. This is the strangest national park in the Netherlands, and one of the most haunted.

Image: Jiří Komárek | CC BY-SA 4.0

Zuid-Kennemerland National Park: A Park Born of an Essay

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit joost j. bakker, CC BY 2.0. In 1944, with the country still under German occupation, the schoolteacher and conservationist Jac. P. Thijsse wrote about a stretch of dunes between Bloemendaal and the North Sea Canal that deserved protecting. Thijsse had spent decades fighting for Dutch nature - he founded Thi...

Image: joost j. bakker | CC BY 2.0

Zuid-Kennemerland National Park: The Bison in the Far Field

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Globe-trotter, CC BY-SA 3.0. Dunes in this part of Holland are calcium-rich, and lime in the sand allows plants to grow here that grow nowhere else in the country - delicate orchids in the slacks, dense thickets of bacciferous shrubs whose berries draw songbirds by the thousand. Over a hundred bird species h...

Image: Globe-trotter | CC BY-SA 3.0

Zuid-Kennemerland National Park: The Bloemendaalse Bos

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michal Osmenda from Brussels, Belgium, CC BY 2.0. On the eastern edge of the park lies a strip of pine and oak forest called the Bloemendaalse Bos. During the German occupation it was a Wehrmacht shooting range. Resistance members captured by the Sicherheitsdienst were brought here to be executed. The most famous of them was Jan...

Image: Michal Osmenda from Brussels, Belgium | CC BY 2.0

Zuid-Kennemerland National Park: A Day at the Wed

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rudko, CC0. Today the park gets 1.8 million visitors a year. In summer, a small fresh-water pond on the road between Bloemendaal and Zandvoort - locals call it 'het Wed' - fills with families on towels and children with inflatable rings. The train from Amsterdam to Zandvoort beach runs strai...

Image: Rudko | CC0