Museum Broekerveiling

Langedijk was a district of about fifteen thousand tiny islands - plots of land surrounded by ditches, worked as market gardens and reachable only by boat, so cabbages, carrots and onions were grown, harvested and moved entirely on the water. From 1887 the growers sold through a cooperative auction, and in 1912 they built a hall the boats could sail into: the loaded punt came through a channel into the auction room, past the buyers and the clock, and out the other side, so the produce never left the water until it was sold. It ran until 1973 and is now a museum, the oldest of its kind in the world, with the clock demonstrated, a garden museum on the old plots, and boat trips through the surviving island landscape - most of it was filled in for housing, but a part remains and shows what fifteen thousand islands looked like.

What you actually see

• Boats sailing through the auction - the hall of 1912 with a channel through it.
• The auction clock - the descending-price system demonstrated for visitors.
• A landscape of tiny islands - the surviving plots, reachable only by water.
• The oldest sail-through auction - running here from 1887 to 1973.

When to go

April to October. Half a day.

Honest expectations

Seasonal opening, closed in winter. Boat trips depend on weather and book up in summer. Most of the island landscape was filled in for housing - what survives is a fragment.

Nearby

Alkmaar and its cheese market are south; the North Holland dunes are west.