Kuiperspoort

We walk through the gate into a courtyard that looks almost exactly as it did in the seventeenth century. This is the Kuiperspoort, named after the coopers, the barrel makers, who had their guild house above the gate here from 1642 onwards.

A cooper made wooden barrels. That might sound humble, but in a trading city it was a key trade, because almost everything crossed the sea in casks. Wine above all, which mattered most to Middelburg, but also sugar, cocoa, gunpowder, salted meat, beer and drinking water for the voyage. A barrel had to stay watertight for months at sea without a single nail in its sides, held together only by the precision with which the staves fit against one another and the hoops around them. If that went wrong, the cargo spoiled and the whole trip was for nothing.

The complex has two faces today. On the right side people simply live, while on the left and behind the gate there's a cultural function. It's one of the places Middelburg had thoroughly restored in the sixties and seventies.

There's also a digital reconstruction of this spot, where you can see what it was like here in the sixteenth century, complete with sound and people dressed in the clothing of that era. If you tap the Kuiperspoort in 3D button, you'll find it.

We head out the other side of the courtyard, towards the Dam. After about two hundred metres we turn left into the Bellinkstraat.