The Best Parks in Utrecht: Where the City Goes Outside

Utrecht's medieval moat is wrapped in a long, narrow park designed in the nineteenth century by the Zocher family, and it is the single best walk in the city. There is a story attached: in the 1970s part of the moat was filled in and turned into a motorway. In this century the city dug it out again and put the water back, finishing in 2020. Walking the full ring now takes about an hour and takes you past almost everything else on this list.

Park Lepelenburg, on one of the old bastions, is the widest part of it and the place people actually sit.

East of the centre, in a nineteenth-century residential district, this is the classic city park: a pond, wide lawns, mature plane trees and a bandstand. It is where families go on a Sunday and where the neighbourhood eats outside in summer. Nothing about it is unusual, and that is rather the point.

North of the centre is a park with an unlikely history. The site was a gasworks, and the soil beneath it was so badly contaminated that it became one of the best-known pollution cases in the country. Rather than abandon it, the ground was sealed and capped and a park laid on top. Today there is a skate bowl, a playground and a small animal enclosure, and it is full of teenagers and toddlers. Knowing what is underneath makes it more impressive, not less.

Out west in Leidsche Rijn is Máximapark, a very large modern park built as the new districts went up. Inside it is the Vlinderhof, a butterfly garden planted by Piet Oudolf — the designer behind New York's High Line — and paid for partly by local fundraising. It is at its best from midsummer into autumn, when the grasses and perennials are at full height and the whole thing is moving with insects. It is a tram ride from the centre and worth the trip if you care about planting at all.

On the science campus east of the city, the botanic gardens are laid out around Fort Hoofddijk — one of the forts of the old Dutch defensive water line. The rock garden is built into and over the fort, so you climb through a military earthwork to look at alpines. There are glasshouses, a butterfly greenhouse and a large collection outdoors. Allow two hours, and check opening times, since they are shorter in winter.

Just outside the city to the south-east, Amelisweerd is an old estate with woodland, a country house and the river Kromme Rijn running through it. It is where Utrecht goes for a proper walk rather than a sit, and it is twenty minutes by bike from the centre.

For a short walk with the city around you, the ring. For an afternoon with children, Griftpark or Wilhelminapark. For plants, the Vlinderhof in late summer or the botanic gardens any time. For actual countryside, Amelisweerd.

The parks are connected by the old streets, the canals and the wharf cellars that Utrecht is really known for. A city game gives you a route of puzzles through the centre and along the water, explaining what you are passing rather than leaving the walk between green spaces as dead time.

Not sure how it works? Read how to play first.

Do the canal ring first, then pick the park that suits the day. Want help planning something for a group? Get in touch. If gardens are your thing, our guide to things to do in Leiden covers one of the oldest botanical gardens in the world.