45 Photos Of Keukenhof Tulip Gardens Near Amsterdam, Netherlands

Shae and I got super lucky on our recent trip to Amsterdam. We’d added a few days in the Netherlands to the end of our UK trip and happened to be visiting during tulip season.

The main tulip attraction in the Netherlands is Keukenhof Tulip Gardens, one of the largest flower gardens in the world. We booked this package through Viator which cost €54 ($61) per person. Our tickets included entry to Keukenhof and a bus ride to and from the gardens, so that made more sense than trying to rent a car to get there.

We were staying at the DoubleTree Amsterdam Centraal Station which was extremely convenient as the bus leaves from Centraal Station.

It was a surprisingly fun ride as the tour guide on the bus was hilarious. He had a dry sense of humor and although I can’t remember the stuff he said, both Shae and I literally laughed out loud several times at his spiel.

It took something like 30-45 minutes to get to the gardens. You then get three hours to explore the site and head back to the meeting point for the journey home.

Keukenhof Tulip Gardens covers 79 acres and is only open from March to May each year as that’s how short tulip season is. Prime tulip season is the middle of April, whereas we visited at the very end of March. That meant we were a little too early to get the ultimate experience, but it was still a great time to visit.

We took an afternoon trip and hadn’t eaten lunch yet, so our first stop was the cafe by the entrance for a sandwich and a slice of tasty Dutch apple pie.

Once we were done eating, we made our way out to explore the gardens. There are miles of trails around Keukenhof, so it’s worth picking up a free pocket map to help find your way around.

Although tulips are the primary attraction, there are all kinds of other flowers to be found at the gardens.

We’d seen on the map that there was a windmill at Keukenhof Tulip Gardens, so Shae and I decided to head there first.

Needless to say, it was a pretty walk to get to the windmill, passing a water fountain…

…and stopping to make our way through the maze. It’s a fairly small maze and easy to find your way through, so there was no concern about wasting three hours stuck in there!

After checking out some of the flowers along the way…

…we got waylaid by the petting zoo. There were baby goats, sheep, bunnies and more; we didn’t get a chance to get too close to the baby goats though as parents were letting their kids chase after them which was freaking them out.

After checking out the animals, we continued to head towards the windmill.

Keukenhof plants 7 million bulbs every year. They plant different varieties and at different times, so the flowers you see in March will likely be different to the ones you’d see if you were to visit in May.

Our tour apparently included a free one hour canal cruise which I didn’t realize until after our trip. That meant we could’ve gotten closer to the tulip fields, but it would’ve taken up a lot of our time at the gardens and so it’s probably not a bad thing that we missed out.

We finally reached the windmill which looked out over some of the tulip fields.

Visitors are allowed up into the windmill and around an outer balcony, giving you a slightly better view of the gardens from above.

Seeing as we were on the eastern side of Keukenhof, we headed to the northeast corner towards the Beatrix building. Along the way we came across a Mini and Volkswagen Beetle filled with flowers.

It wasn’t only the flowers worth seeing at the gardens as some of the trees had beautiful blossoms.

Tulips are a huge industry in the Netherlands. They produce more than 4 billion bulbs every year, with half of those being exported. 60,000 acres of the country are dedicated to the growth of tulips.

There was a 60s flower power theme going on inside the Beatrix building.

We were more than halfway through our three hours by this point, so Shae and I started heading towards the Willem-Alexander building, home to another flower show.

The flower show inside the Willem-Alexander building featured dozens – if not hundreds – of different types of tulips. This was actually our favorite part of the visit, so we were glad we hadn’t left it until the last minute and had plenty of time to wander around.

While some of the tulips looked very tulip-y, there were all kinds of varieties that didn’t look at all as we’d expected. All the following photos are of tulips and were some of my favorites that we saw.

The afternoon was getting on, so we said farewell to all the tulips and made our way to the bus via the gift shop.

Final Thoughts

Amsterdam is a wonderful city, so we’d highly recommend taking a trip there. If you’re flexible with your dates, it’s definitely worth visiting between late March and mid-May so that you can take a day trip to Keukenhof Tulip Gardens.

You can also take a bus trip to Keukenhof from Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, so a long layover could provide an opportunity to visit the tulip gardens even if you’re not staying in the city overnight.

Check out this post for everything else we got up to in Amsterdam.