Maastricht; Saturday, 09 August, 2025

I’d booked the hotel using points, so the standard room rate that I had didn’t include breakfast, and buying in the hotel made the buffet breakfast very expensive. Thankfully the room had a small, and empty, fridge and next door to the hotel was a supermarket so the previous evening I’d stocked up on supplies for breakfast, which I had in my room before heading out for a days exploring of the city.

Rather than crossing over on the High Bridge I headed a bit downstream and crossed over on the historic Sint-Servaas Brug, or Saint Servatius Bridge, named (in the 1930s) for the first bishop of Maastricht, prior to the naming it was just the old bridge. And old it is, being regularly described as the oldest bridge in the Netherlands and dating back to at least the 13th century, though in the middle of the 19th century two of the original stone spans were removed to be replaced with a steel lifting bridge to allow much larger river traffic to pass beyond the city downstream.

From the bridge I wandered back through the Markt and the Vrijthof to visit the two churches that back onto the latter square – The Basilica of St Servatius, but before that the Church of St. Jan. This church – visible for some distance because of its red painted spire – was originally just the baptistry of the Basilica but became a church in its own right during the reformation. Inside it’s a pretty simple church with the seating laid out around the pulpit. The main reason for visiting though is the tower, which is the only one in the city that is open to climb, with 218 steps – that get quite cramped by the top – taking you up to the base of the spire and from here views out over most of the city centre.

Back down on ground level I headed next door to visit the Basiliek van Sint Servaas, which claims to hold the tomb of the 4th century bishop of Maastricht, as well as having a spectacular cloister and garden and a treasury. I spent quite a bit of time looking around the different parts of the building, before moving on to my third and final church of the day, and the second basilica, the Basiliek van Onze Lieve Vrouwe or Basilica of Our Lady.

This is a much more austere building than the others, with the very tall front façade looking more like a fortification rather than a religious building – and the lack of windows and very high ceilings make the interior very dark too, which makes the light filled cloister and small but very pretty cloister garden quite surprising when you find them just off of the main church building.

With all the churches I intended on visiting ticked off, and with a quick sandwich lunch for a shop in the town centre, I set off on a 20-minute walk out to the edge of the city centre and a rarity in the Netherlands – a hill. In this instance the St Pietersberg or Saint Peter’s Hill which hides a number of different attractions. On the very top of the hill is a fort, built to help defend the city, and underneath the hill is a series of caves that have pretty much hollowed out a good part of the hill.

My first stop was the fort – Fort Sint Pieters which can only be visited on a guided tour, which I’d pre-booked onto (people turning up on the day were being disappointed to find out all the English tours had sold out). The tour takes you first down underneath the dry moat of the fort before you ascend up through the building and out onto the top of the fort for views out over the city and surrounding countryside, along the way the guide tells the history of the building, and the reasons why it was built.

After the fort tour I had then booked onto a tour of the northern part of the cave complex. The caves aren’t natural caves, more the galleries dug out of the rock as the limestone that was used to build a lot of the city was mined from underneath the hill. The particular band of limestone runs about 35m below the surface level and goes down about 10m before the flint layers become too thick to make mining profitable, so a large network of galleries all on the same level were constructed over a number of centuries, today creating passageways that laid end to end would stretch most of the way to Amsterdam, which is why you have to go in on a guided tour as there’s no way you’d get back out again if you went on your own.

From the cave tour I had a bit more of a wander around the top of Sint Pietersberg to take in the views over the city and then a bit further on the section of the hill that’s been removed – along with a large portion of the galleries of the southern part of the cave system – as a cement factory used the much quicker open-cast mining method to get at the rock, taking way a good portion of the hill.

I headed back in towards the centre of town, though it turned out, when I checked on Google Maps, I’d walked further out that I thought and it was a good 4km walk back to the hotel, so I stopped off on the way for a quick bite to eat, which was probably not the best of ideas as I was quite stiff when I stood up to leave the restaurant and the walk back to the hotel was slower and stiffer than I’d been earlier. Back in the hotel I took advantage of having a bath in the room to try and relax my joints before a quick nightcap and then turning in for the night.