Delft Gates and Delftware Audio Walking Tour (Self-Guided)

Most visitors to Delft stay inside the ring of canals around the market square, and they miss a side of the town that tells a different story. This walk follows the eastern and southern edge of Delft, from the last of its medieval town gates, through the green campus of the country's oldest technical university, to the pottery that has made Delft blue since the seventeenth century. It ends on the waterside where Johannes Vermeer looked across the old harbor and painted one of the most admired cityscapes in the world. The route is about three kilometers, flat the whole way, and of all our self-guided walking tours of Delft it is the one for anyone curious about how this small town shaped the wider world, from blue and white pottery to modern engineering.

Before you set off

Allow about forty minutes for the walking, and two to three hours with stops, more if you take the full tour at Royal Delft or linger among the glasshouses. The ground is flat and paved, with a few stretches along busy roads and over canal bridges. This is a cycling town, and on and around the university campus the bike traffic can be heavy, especially at the start and end of lectures. Bikes have priority on the bike paths, which are usually paved in red, so stay off the red lanes and look both ways before every crossing. The canal edges have no railings, so keep an eye on children near the water. The botanic garden and Royal Delft both charge admission and keep their own hours, so check before you go. The campus is open and breezy, with less shade than the old town, so bring a hat in summer and a windproof layer the rest of the year. The walk finishes a few minutes from Delft Station, which makes it easy to end with a train back to The Hague or Rotterdam.

Oostpoort

Begin beside the Oostpoort, the East Gate, and find a spot on the water where you can see the whole of it. Two slim towers with tall pointed spires rise side by side over a brick gateway, with a white wooden drawbridge stretched across the canal beside them. It looks almost too pretty to have been built for defense, but that is exactly what it was. In the Middle Ages, Delft was enclosed by walls and a moat, and the gates were where the town controlled who and what came in. Traders paid their tolls here, watchmen checked strangers, and at night the gates were shut. The oldest parts of the Oostpoort go back to around 1400, and the elegant spires were added roughly a century later. Delft once had a whole ring of gates, but as the town outgrew its walls in the nineteenth century they were torn down one after another, and this is the only one left. The canal in front of you follows the line of the old moat, and if you look along it you can picture the walls that once ran beside it. The gate is not a museum, so enjoy it from the outside, ideally from the bridge, where the towers reflect in the water on a still day. Then cross the drawbridge to the far bank and head south for about six minutes to the gates of the botanic garden.

TU Delft Botanic Garden

You have reached the TU Delft Botanic Garden, a peaceful walled garden with glasshouses, ponds and old trees, tucked away on the edge of the university. It feels like a secret, and on a weekday morning you may have it nearly to yourself. The garden belongs to the Delft University of Technology, and it was founded in the early twentieth century with a very particular purpose. At the time, the college in Delft was training engineers and technologists to work in the Dutch colonies in the East Indies, today's Indonesia, and the garden's job was to grow the useful plants of the tropics so students could study them up close. That is why the glasshouses here are still full of plants that people eat, drink, wear or build with: crops behind familiar things like coffee, tea, spices and rubber, growing a long way from the plantations that once made the Netherlands rich. Step inside a glasshouse if the garden is open, and the warm, wet air hits you at once. Outside, the gardens are laid out for strolling, with benches beneath the trees and a pond with water plants. It is a small place, but a good reminder that Delft's connections reached across the oceans. Check opening times before you go. From here, head south into the university campus, following the main avenue between the faculty buildings, for about nine minutes, until you see a vast slab of concrete and a lawn that slopes up into the sky.