Windmill Island

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Windmill Island Park

 

Windmill Island Park

Each May Holland hosts an annual Tulip Time Festival. Tulip planting and the festival began in 1930 when 250,000 tulips were planted for the event. Currently six million tulips are used throughout the city. Tulips are planted along many city streets, in city parks and outside municipal buildings as well as at tourist attractions like Dutch Village, the city-owned Windmill Island park, and at a large tulip farm named Veldheer Tulip Gardens.

 


It is normally held the second week of May, right when the numerous tulips planted around the town are blooming. The festival lasts for over a week and features three parades: the Volksparade, usually led by the state governor with a broom as townspeople in Dutch costume wash the street; the Kinderparade, featuring local children dressed in traditional Dutch costume and wooden shoes; and the Muziekparade of marching bands that come from local high schools, to regional to national. Some bands even come as far as New York to march in the Muziekparade. The festival includes fireworks, musical shows and 1,000-2,000 klompen dancers, mostly females, dance on city streets in traditional wooden shoes (klompen); some of them go on to represent Holland nationally. The festival is so well entrenched in Holland's culture that members of the city's large Mexican-American minority are frequently seen participating in the klompen dances. Churches and schools are used to provide Dutch meals to tour groups. About one million tourists visit Tulip Time each year. It has been ranked as America's third largest town festival and was named Reader's Digest's best small town festival.

Text from Wikipedia

 

 

Post Box

 

 

 

 

 

Sluice Gate

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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