Built From Rubble
On 14 May 1940, the German Luftwaffe carried out a deliberate bombing raid on the centre of Rotterdam intended to break Dutch resistance. The medieval city — the canal houses, the guild halls, the covered markets, the full historic fabric of the old port — burned for two days. Around 24,000 buildings were destroyed, 900 people died, and 78,000 were made homeless. The centre was reduced to a flat, open plain.
The decision not to rebuild what had existed was deliberate and, at the time, controversial. Other bombed European cities chose to restore their historic centres — Warsaw rebuilt its old town stone by stone from 18th-century paintings; Dresden reconstructed the Frauenkirche from numbered rubble. Rotterdam went in the opposite direction. The cleared ground was treated as a design opportunity on a scale that had never been available to a European city in peacetime.
The 1953 Lijnbaan, one of the first purpose-built pedestrian shopping streets in the world, went up on what had been a medieval quarter. The Euromast of 1960 gave the port a tower purely for the view. The 1980s brought Piet Blom's Cube Houses — thirty-eight yellow cubes tilted onto their corners over the Blaak pedestrian plaza. By the 1990s, the Kop van Zuid district on the south bank of the Nieuwe Maas was being handed to some of the most significant architects alive: Renzo Piano designed the KPN Tower, Norman Foster the Montevideo residential building, and Rem Koolhaas built De Rotterdam, the largest building in the Netherlands, a three-tower vertical city that shifts its upper halves off the lower blocks as if the city were rearranging itself mid-air.
The Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, finished in 2021, completed the argument. MVRDV designed a mirrored bowl — shaped like a storage vessel from the port — to hold the museum's entire collection of 151,000 works in publicly accessible glass-walled storage rooms. It is the first art storage building anywhere in the world opened in full to the public. In Rotterdam, the warehouse is the museum.
The Port That Built the World
Rotterdam's character as a port city predates the 1940 bombing by three centuries. The harbour on the Nieuwe Maas grew in the 17th century into one of the busiest trading ports in Europe, sending Dutch ships to the East Indies, the Cape of Good Hope, and the Caribbean. The Holland America Line — the company whose flagship, the ss Rotterdam, still sits moored at Katendrecht — carried millions of European emigrants to New York between 1872 and 1971. Rotterdam was the last European ground many of them ever stood on.
Today it remains the largest port in Europe by cargo volume, processing more than 400 million tonnes of goods each year through a complex of docks stretching 42 kilometres to the North Sea. The working port is largely invisible from the city centre, but the scale of it is legible from the Euromast and the Erasmusbrug: the Nieuwe Maas below the bridge carries container ships, tankers, and bulk carriers continuously, and the cranes of the Maasvlakte extension are just visible on the western horizon on clear days.
The gap between the port and the city has always generated tension and energy. Rotterdam money is working money, not old money; the city has historically been less interested in cultural institutions than in commerce, and the institutions it has built — the Boijmans, the Architecture Institute, the world-class concert venue de Doelen — were often late by comparison with Amsterdam. This has made Rotterdam less precious about what it is and more willing to become something else.
Borrowed Flavours
Rotterdam's port history brought the world to the city, and the city absorbed it differently than anywhere else in the Netherlands. The Indonesian community arrived in significant numbers after Indonesian independence in 1949, bringing the rijsttafel — the colonial tradition of 20 to 30 small dishes served alongside rice — and establishing a neighbourhood food culture in Delfshaven and Rotterdam-South that has outlasted the colonial relationship it came from.
The Surinamese community, many of whom arrived after Surinamese independence in 1975, established another distinct food culture in the city: Surinamese satay, sharper and sweeter than the Indonesian version, is as native to Rotterdam's markets as any Dutch dish. The Cape Verdean community, one of the largest in the Netherlands, gave the city the kapsalon — the combination of döner, fries, Gouda, salad, sambal, and garlic sauce that a Cape Verdean barber named Nathaniël Gomes requested from the shawarma shop on the Hoogstraat in 2003, and which spread to every city in the Netherlands within a decade.
None of these are tourist attractions. They are the normal food of a city that has been a port for 700 years and has taken in everything the sea brought. The architecture is spectacular; the food is the daily life of the same city.