Day trip to Heusden and Den Bosch. Part I

I survived to last weekend's party in Bilbao and I am back to continue talking about the Easter holidays, a bit late but as we say in Spanish, better late than never. On Easter Sunday we were thinking on going to Amsterdam but we thought it better and we decided to go to the south. Raffaella Carrá taught us that to make love properly you must go to the South, so there we went, to Noord Brabant, that even if is the North Brabant (there is a South Brabant in Belgium) it is in the South of The Netherlands.

Church bells in Heusden

I like Brabant and its people quite a lot, I work there and I work with a lot of Brabanters and you can feel that they are different from the Randstaders. We went first to Heusden, a fortified medieval village in the bank of the Maas, one of the three most important rivers of The Netherlands and the one that settles what is considered the South of the country.

Inner harbor with the windmill and a typical bridge

Village is star shaped, as was Naarden, and has an impressive rounded harbor inside the city defensive walls. It is not very big -I would say it is pretty small actually, but there is a bigger one outside the walls- but maybe because of being so small is so impressive, you arrive there and the water is like 4 meters down there... well, not that 4 meters is a big step but normally in Holland water is always too close to you! And I don't know, it looks like a big hole full of water and boats.

Shopping  street in the center

There is also quite a tall wind mill with very steep stairs, I had troubles to go down which is not something new as I am pretty afraid of high places... specially if I have to go down after it! In front of the windmill in the opposite side of the harbor you have the fish market and from there cozy shopping streets lead to a couple of churches and the town hall. The defensive walls are luckily not needed anymore so they are gone and instead of them there is a huge park that fully surrounds the town, here and there there are cannons from other time.

Cannons nearby the harbor

You can see that this village has had and still has a lot of money, houses are amazing and a lot of them have symbols on their doors and facades. It is a very nice place to visit and take a walk, if you are in the area do not hesitate on going there to spend a morning or an afternoon. After this town we went to 's-Hertogenbosch, better known as Den Bosch, capital city of North Brabant.