"Almere – the artificial one" Almere-Stad by Airpunk

In 2007, I went for the fourth time in sequence for a short summer trip to the Netherlands. Again, the whole trip was built around Rotterdam’s famous Zomercarnaval and a visit to the Aviodrome museum. And so, for being close to the latter one, I decided that my “base” should be in Flevoland. Unfortunately, I didn’t succeed in finding a decent campground which was reachable with public transport, so that I switched to Almere where I found Waterhout.

Almere is surely not a city for everyone and I don’t think that it’s a city where I would like to live for a long time. It was nice to explore the city center with the one or other pleasant surprise of modern architecture. But I don’t have the feeling that there’s a lot of life going on here. It’s more like a suburb of Amsterdam where people just come to sleep. OK, the bloody summer of 2007 did a lot to make the atmosphere really depressive. But even indoors, it was hard to find anything spectacular. If you like to see something different, a daytrip to Almere may be nice. But there are surely more interesting places in the Netherlands to see.

Almere seen from the southern weerwater shore

Like all places in Flevoland, Almere is a product of the 80s and 90s. The first buildings appeared in 1980 so that the architectural style is quite monotone. The city is built on so-called polders, land won by draining water of the Zuiderzee. The plans didn’t see the city to grow to today’s size of almost 200 000 inhabitants. The Zuiderzee Works and all related projects saw Lelystad to be the center of the new land. However, it was decided not to build the last polder, the Markerwaardpolder. So, Lelystad is not located in the center of the new land but a little remote. So Almere became the most inhabited city due to ists proximity to Amsterdam. The city is divided into several districts with Almere-Stad being the center of it all. All districts are carefully planned and not grown “naturally” as in other cities. Street names in each urbanization are following a scheme. So, there’s for example is Muziekwijk where all streets have names of famous musicians or a stripheldenbuurt where famous comic characters like Snoopy and Mickey Mouse have their own street.

• Pros:Good train connections to Lelystad and Amsterdam
• Cons:Cultural life is only slowly moving in