Almere is not the kind of city that comes with a list of must-sees, but for anyone curious about contemporary Dutch architecture and urban planning it is one of the most interesting places in the country. The Stadshart centre was masterplanned by Rem Koolhaas's OMA in the late 1990s and the resulting cluster of buildings — De Citadel by Christian de Portzamparc, the Kunstlinie by SANAA, the public library by Concrete Architectural Associates — reads like a small open-air biennale of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century architecture.
Beyond the centre, the city is wrapped in green: the artificial lake of the Weerwater, the Pampushout forest to the west, the Hortus botanical garden left over from the 2022 Floriade horticultural expo, and, just outside the municipal boundary, the great rewilded marshland of the Oostvaardersplassen. The land-art Green Cathedral of Lombardy poplars in Almere-Buiten is a hidden gem worth the trip out.