A Guide to Leeuwarden organises walking tours in Leeuwarden. We have been doing this since 2013, offering accessible public Free Walking Tours as well as customized private tours for both groups and schools. Because we believe that the best introduction to Leeuwarden is a personal tour with one of our guides.
What to expect on our walking tours
Our walking tours last 1.5 hours and you’ll always be accompanied by an enthusiastic guide. On our public walking tours (Leeuwarden Free Tours) and our Leeuwarden Private Tours, our guides always aim to provide a good mix of remarkable buildings, famous Leeuwarden residents, hidden gems and the finest street art. Along the way, our guides will stop to tell you the most fascinating stories. These stories are informative, but also entertaining and often told with a touch of humour. We see it as the best introduction to Leeuwarden.
These tours are accessible to a very wide audience. With us, you won’t be overwhelmed with facts, dates and too many details. A good guide knows how to dose their information. We tell great stories and are also happy to answer any in-depth questions.
Our guides love being around people. They prefer to tell historical stories that focus on people. But they also show you the Leeuwarden of today. There’s a good chance you’ll also get a tip for a fun cultural activity, where to find the most beautiful mural, or where to find the latest coffee shop.
How ‘A Guide to Leeuwarden’ began…
‘A Guide to Leeuwarden’ was founded in 2013 by Henk Leutscher. He had just returned from two year-long trips around the world and, back in Leeuwarden, wanted to do something involving travellers and history. This led to the creation of a website offering tips on Leeuwarden, followed by Free Tours.
Henk continued to travel, and in every city he visited, he joined a city walking tour. Afterwards, he would analyse these tours and note down the best bits in a notebook. He built on these experiences, and as a result, the city walking tours in Leeuwarden kept getting better and better.
The top-rated walking tours in Leeuwarden!
The walking tours offered by A Guide to Leeuwarden have been the top-rated tours in Leeuwarden and the whole of the northern Netherlands on Google and TripAdvisor for years! Read all our reviews on our reviews page.
A small team of highly experienced guides
A Guide to Leeuwarden has deliberately chosen to have a small team of highly experienced guides. They lead guided tours every day around the city and in the various museums in Leeuwarden. As a result, we are sometimes fully booked, but if you’ve booked a tour with us, you can be sure you’ll have a very good and experienced guide.
These are enthusiastic and passionate guides who want to know everything there is to know about Leeuwarden. So, if you’re looking for a deeper insight, A Guide to Leeuwarden is the right place for you. Many of our guides also work at the Fries Museum, the Fries Resistance Museum and the Princessehof Ceramics Museum. In addition, some of the guides have studied history and therefore possess a wealth of knowledge about local history. For themed walks such as the Second World War Tour, the Mata Hari Tour, Traces of the History of Slavery or the Art Nouveau Tour, our guides have scoured the archives and read countless books to select the best stories for the tours. So please don’t hesitate to ask questions; our guides are always happy to share a little more when you ask.
As almost all our guides work full-time, very little in the city escapes their notice. For instance, they have spoken personally to almost every artist who has created a work of art in the city. Their information is therefore usually first-hand. Our guides would be delighted to introduce themselves to you.
Partners
A Guide to Leeuwarden loves to collaborate. For example, in partnership with the Fries Museum and the Princessehof Ceramics Museum, we offer educational tours. We run Street Art Tours at Writers Block events. We have developed tours for festivals such as the Northern Film Festival and City Proms. We’ve also been organising tours for LUNA and Explore the North for years. We’ve developed special tours for Pier21, Stichting de Verhalen and Tryater to serve as pre-show activities for their theatre productions. And whenever bloggers or influencers need a guided tour, Visit Leeuwarden and Visit Friesland always know where to find us. Would you like to collaborate with us too? Please do get in touch – we’d love to hear from you!
In the media
The fact that Leeuwarden offers some excellent city walks has not gone unnoticed by the media. Our tours have been featured on television programmes such as the Dutch NOS journaal, Max Vakantieman, the German ZDF programme Volle Kanne (in German) and the Canadian TV5 programme Partir Autrement (in French).
Our tours have also been featured in newspapers on several occasions. For example, our guides have been mentioned in the Algemeen Dagblad, Trouw and local newspapers such as the Leeuwarder Courant, Friesch Dagblad and Groot Leeuwarden. We’ve also been featured internationally in the Daily Telegraph (UK) and the Niederrhein Nachrichten (Germany).