150 m

Welcome to Utrecht! You're at Utrecht Centraal, the Netherlands' main railway hub and the perfect starting point to discover one of the country's oldest cities. Utrecht Centraal is where the Netherlands literally comes together. Trains from virtually every part of the country pass through Utrecht, and hundreds of thousands of travellers use the station every day. Given the city's central location, that makes perfect sense. From here you're about half an hour by train from Amsterdam, three quarters of an hour from Rotterdam and about three quarters of an hour from The Hague. But Utrecht was important long before the first train arrived. The city's history goes back almost 2,000 years. Around 47 AD, the Romans built a fort on the site of today's Domplein. This fort, Traiectum, stood on the northern border of the Roman Empire — what we now know as the Limes Germanicus. The name Traiectum means something like a place where you can cross a river. Over the centuries the name changed. Through forms like Ultra Traiectum and Ultraiectum, the name Utrecht eventually emerged. After Roman times, Utrecht grew into an important religious centre. From the early Middle Ages, bishops settled here and churches and monasteries were built throughout the city. For centuries Utrecht was even the most important ecclesiastical centre of the Northern Netherlands. The enormous Dom Tower you'll see up close later on this walk is perhaps the best-known remnant of that era. But Utrecht is much more than just a historic city. Today it's a young, fast-growing and vibrant city. More than 370,000 people live here, and thanks to Utrecht University and several colleges of applied sciences, tens of thousands of students live and study here. You'll notice that when you walk through the city centre. Centuries-old churches and canals alternate with coffee shops, restaurants, stores, student houses and cultural venues. And then there are the bicycles. Utrecht is a true cycling city. Around the station you get an immediate sense of that. Beneath the station square lies a huge bicycle parking facility with room for more than 12,000 bikes. When it opened, it was the largest bicycle parking facility in the world. The station itself has a long history. In 1843 the first Utrecht station opened as part of the railway connection with Amsterdam. More lines followed. Thanks to its central location, Utrecht grew into the most important hub of the Dutch rail network. Today's Utrecht Centraal looks completely different from that first station. The large station hall with its wave-shaped roof is part of a massive renewal of the station area. The renovated station officially opened in 2016. So before you move on, take a moment to look around. What you see here is modern Utrecht: trains, offices, shops, high-rises, thousands of bicycles and people heading in every direction. But in just a few minutes that picture will change completely. On the other side of Hoog Catharijne you'll find narrow streets, canals, medieval houses, hidden courtyards and of course the Dom Tower. That contrast is what makes Utrecht so interesting. It's not a city that only tries to preserve its past. Old and new exist side by side here, constantly. During this walk we'll discover exactly that. We'll walk from the modern station area via Hoog Catharijne to the historic Oudegracht. We'll find out why Utrecht has such unique wharf cellars, stand on a spot where Roman soldiers walked almost 2,000 years ago, visit the heart of medieval Utrecht and discover a few places along the way that you might easily walk past. And in the end we'll finish at a fitting Utrecht location: with a Belgian beer in a former church.