Ede is a quiet Dutch town of around 120,000 people on the western edge of the Veluwe, the largest area of woodland and heath in the Netherlands. Most visitors do not come for the town itself — Ede is pleasant, tidy, and unexceptional, as Dutch provincial towns often are — but for what lies just to the east. A few kilometres from the town centre begins the Hoge Veluwe National Park, 5,500 hectares of pine forest, heather moor, drift sand and small lakes, with red deer, wild boar, moufflon, and a kind of landscape you don't really expect to find in the Netherlands.
At the heart of the park is the Kröller-Müller Museum, one of the most remarkable art collections in the world for its size — nearly 300 works by Vincent van Gogh, an outstanding holding of Dutch, French and German modernism, and a 25-hectare sculpture garden with pieces by Rodin, Moore, Dubuffet, Oldenburg and Serra hidden among the pines. The museum is the legacy of Helene Kröller-Müller, a German industrialist's wife who spent three decades buying art and eventually gave it, along with the estate around it, to the Dutch state in 1935. Nearby is the Sint Hubertus Hunting Lodge, designed by the Amsterdam-school architect H.P. Berlage, and the Museonder, the world's first underground museum. Across the park you can pick up one of the free white bicycles left at the gates and ride for hours without seeing a car.
The town of Ede itself has a small historic centre, an old church and a local history museum in the former Ede-Centrum railway station; nearby villages like Otterlo, at the main gate of the park, and Bennekom, with its genteel villas and Hoekelum Castle, are worth a short detour if you are staying longer.