Private Tour to Zaanse Schans Windmills from Amsterdam

You'll walk through the village with your guide, past the green wooden houses that were moved here from across the Zaan region and rebuilt board by board. Inside one of the historic houses you'll see how a Zaan family actually lived, including the bedsteads built into the walls — closets with doors that shut, where whole families slept sitting almost upright, and where children were born and grandparents died within the same panelled box. Your guide also explains the regional costume still worn here on holidays, including the oorijzer — a metal ornament worn beneath a woman's cap, which began as a simple band to hold it in place and grew into a display of gold or silver at the temples, telling anyone who passed which village she came from and what her family could afford. You'll hear, too, how this stretch of river became one of the first industrial areas in Europe.

Here you'll first see how Dutch cheese is actually made — the curd, the press, the months of turning that separate a young Gouda from an aged one. Then comes the tasting: more than twenty varieties laid out to try, from mild and creamy to crumbly, dark and smoked.

Inside De Kat, one of the last working paint mills in the world, you'll see the millstones grinding chalk and pigment into paint, much as they did in the eighteenth century, when hundreds of mills stood along this river. You'll also learn to read the language of the mills: before telephones, millers spoke to each other across the fields by the angle at which they parked the sails.

A block of poplar becomes a wearable shoe in under five minutes on machinery that hasn't changed much in a century. Your guide explains the different kinds of clogs — the plain ones worn for work in the fields, and the carved and painted pairs a man once made for his bride. You can try a pair on before you leave.

A traditional bakery where you can try a warm appelbeignet — apple with almond paste and cinnamon in a light batter, fried and dusted with sugar. The walls are lined with Delft Blue tiles, and your guide explains how this blue-and-white pottery became one of the most recognisable things the Netherlands ever produced.