Where to stay in Rotterdam

Design lovers€€€

Design hotel inside a skyscraper · Kop van Zuid

nhow Rotterdam

The hotel occupies the lower third of De Rotterdam, the stacked-block tower Rem Koolhaas and OMA finished on the Wilhelminapier in 2013, so every room looks either down the river or straight at the Erasmus Bridge. Reception is on the seventh floor and the water taxi jetty is a two-minute walk, which puts the old centre four minutes away across the Maas.

from ~210 EUR/night

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Landmark stay€€

Former shipping line headquarters · Kop van Zuid

Hotel New York

This is the 1901 head office of the Holland America Line, the twin-towered building where hundreds of thousands of emigrants bought their ticket to New York before sailing from the quay outside. The ground-floor cafe keeps the old boardroom fittings and serves until late, and the hotel has its own water taxi stop for the crossing to Veerhaven.

from ~150 EUR/night

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Central and walkable€€

Compact tech-forward rooms · Centrum and the Lijnbaan

citizenM Rotterdam

Rooms are small and wall-to-wall bed, with lighting, blinds and television run from a tablet, and the canteen downstairs serves food and drink around the clock. It stands on Gelderseplein between the Markthal and the Cube Houses, one minute from Blaak metro and rail station.

from ~115 EUR/night

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Budget€

Gallery-street hostel · Witte de Withkwartier

King Kong Hostel

A converted building at Witte de Withstraat 74, halfway along the bar and gallery strip, with dorms, private rooms, a guest kitchen and bikes to rent at the desk. Kunsthal and the Depot are a fifteen-minute walk through the Museumpark, so you can skip transport entirely for a museum day.

from ~32 EUR/night

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The decision board

This is the rebuilt heart, running from Rotterdam Centraal down the Coolsingel to Blaak, and it holds most of what a short trip needs within a ten-minute walk. The Markthal, the Cube Houses, the Laurenskerk and the 1953 Lijnbaan shopping street are all here, along with the metro and rail interchange at Blaak. It is functional rather than pretty, and that is the honest character of the city.

The old Holland America Line quays on the south bank were left derelict after the passenger liners stopped and were rebuilt from the 1990s into the towers of the Wilhelminapier, reached by the Erasmusbrug. You stay here for water on three sides, the best skyline views in the city and a real sense of the port, with Hotel New York's clock towers standing where emigrants boarded for New York. Everything on the north bank is a four-minute walk over the bridge or a short hop on the water taxi.

Witte de Withstraat is the one street in Rotterdam that reliably has people on it after ten at night, a few hundred metres of galleries, bars, kitchens and record shops between the Maritiem Museum and the Museumpark. It is the closest the city gets to a scene, and it stays busy on weeknights rather than only at weekends. Base here if you want to walk home from dinner and do not mind noise.

Delfshaven is the corner the bombing missed, a narrow working harbour of leaning brick warehouses, gabled houses and moored historic boats about 3 kilometres west of the centre. The Pilgrims boarded here in 1620 on the first leg of their crossing, and the church they prayed in still stands on the quay. It gives you the old Dutch scene the rest of Rotterdam cannot, with a fraction of the visitors of Amsterdam's canals.

East of the centre the city turns leafy: nineteenth-century villas, the student streets around Oude Plantage and then the Kralingse Plas, a lake ringed by woodland with two working snuff mills on its southern shore. Families and runners use it the way Amsterdammers use the Vondelpark, and on a warm evening half the city seems to be on the grass. It is residential, so you trade nightlife for space and quiet.

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