The Wharf Cellars of the Oudegracht

The street you are walking on is a roof. Below you lie seven hundred and thirty-two wharf cellars, and together they form a harbour of a kind that exists nowhere else in the world.

They came about through merchants, one after another, without anyone ever drawing up a plan. In the second half of the twelfth century, shortly after the canal had been dug, someone worked out that it was easier to move his goods straight from the quay into his cellar than to haul them up to the higher bank. The neighbours copied him, the cellars grew on under the street, and by the start of the sixteenth century a harbour of almost two kilometres ran straight through the city.

That harbour is now a problem. The quay walls are giving way under traffic they were never built for, and repairing the whole wharf district is costed at more than five hundred million euros. The walls belong to the city, the cellars to private owners, and so Utrecht is still paying for one merchant's bright idea from eight centuries ago.

We now walk along the water to the Vismarkt.