Haarlem Audio Tours

Haarlem predates Amsterdam by at least a century and was for much of the Dutch Golden Age its commercial and artistic equal. The Grote Markt, a large cobblestone square surrounded by the 14th-century St. Bavo's Church and the city hall, is one of the finest medieval market squares in the Netherlands. The church itself took 150 years to build and contains the Miller organ that a ten-year-old Mozart played in 1766, drawing on its 5,000 pipes to improvise for an audience that likely had no idea they were witnessing something notable.

Frans Hals lived and worked here for most of his adult life, and the museum bearing his name holds the largest collection of his work in the world.

His group portraits of civic guard companies and regents of the old age home, painted with a looseness of brushstroke that looks almost contemporary, hang in the same rooms where they were originally installed. The Corrie ten Boom House on Barteljorisstraat preserves the family watchmaker's shop where a Dutch family hid Jewish neighbors during the German occupation; the hiding place behind a false wall in an upstairs bedroom has been kept exactly as it was.