Things to do in The Hague

Landmark · Centrum

A thirteenth-century courtyard on a rectangular pond that has housed Dutch government for seven centuries.

Local tip: The complex is closed for a long structural restoration and parliament is sitting elsewhere in the city, so the interior tours are not running. The Hofvijver walk and the view from Lange Vijverberg are unaffected and still the best five minutes in the centre.

Culture · Centrum, beside the Hofvijver

A small seventeenth-century palace holding the Girl with a Pearl Earring, the Goldfinch and Rembrandt's anatomy lesson.

Local tip: It is genuinely small — two floors and about 800 works — so it is an hour, not a day, and far less punishing than the Rijksmuseum. Book a timed slot and go late in the afternoon when the tour groups have moved on.

Nature · North-west coast

Eleven kilometres of North Sea beach with a pier at one end and protected dune reserve behind it.

Local tip: Scheveningen Bad is the pier, the crowds and the fairground; walk twenty minutes south-west into Westduinpark and Kijkduin and it is dunes, Highland cattle and almost nobody. Winter storms here are a legitimate reason to go to the beach.

Food · Transvaal

One of the largest open-air markets in Europe — over 500 stalls, four days a week, in the most multicultural quarter of the city.

Local tip: Go on a Wednesday or Saturday morning for the full thing. Prices are a fraction of the supermarket for fruit, vegetables, fish and fabric, and the Turkish, Surinamese and Moroccan food stalls are the reason locals cross the city for it.

Nightlife · West of the centre

The nineteenth-century quarter where the city actually goes out — independent bars, small restaurants and no tourists.

Local tip: The Grote Markt is where students drink and Zeeheldenkwartier is where everyone else does. Reinkenstraat and Prins Hendrikstraat between them cover most of the good small restaurants in the city.

Culture · Zeestraat, near the international zone

A 14-metre-high, 120-metre circumference painting of 1881 Scheveningen, viewed from a platform in the middle of it.

Local tip: It is the largest surviving nineteenth-century panorama in the world and it has never been moved from the purpose-built rotunda it was painted in. From an unremarkable door on Zeestraat you walk up a stair and are suddenly standing on a dune. Twenty minutes, and almost nobody who lives here has been.