Breda Audio Tours

Breda sits in the North Brabant province of the Netherlands, a market city whose compact historic center preserves an unusual concentration of Gothic and Baroque architecture for a Dutch city of its size. The Grote Kerk, the Church of Our Lady, looms above the market square and contains inside its gothic nave the Nassau Mausoleum, a Renaissance tomb built for Engelbert II, Count of Nassau, completed around 1535 with four knights supporting the sarcophagus in a piece of sculpture that belongs in any conversation about the finest Renaissance work north of the Alps. The counts of Nassau were the ancestors of the Dutch House of Orange.

Breda Castle, first built in the 14th century and now housing the Dutch Military Academy, closes off the view at the end of the main street from the church.

The Treaty of Breda was signed here in 1667, ending the Second Anglo-Dutch War and transferring the territories that would become New York state from Dutch to English control in exchange for Suriname. The city's Begijnhof, a quiet walled courtyard of modest houses where religious women once lived in community, is one of the best-preserved begijnhoven in the Netherlands and offers complete silence five minutes from the market square.