Bloemenmarkt

Market · Singel (Centrum)Amsterdam, Netherlands

The Bloemenmarkt has stood on the Singel since 1862, and it is sold everywhere as the world's only floating flower market. The first half is true. Growers really did sail their flowers down the canals from the bulb fields and sell straight off the barge, and the stalls really do stand over water rather than on the pavement. The floating part is not: from the 1950s the barges were fixed permanently in place, and the stalls now rest on pontoons and piles that have not moved in about seventy years. What you are looking at is a market that used to arrive by boat and no longer does. What it sells has shifted the same way. A good share of the stalls now deal in wooden tulips, clog magnets and seed packets aimed squarely at visitors, and locals buy their flowers elsewhere. The bulbs are what is left to buy — tulip, amaryllis and hyacinth by the bag, photographed on the label — but buy them knowing what a 2019 test for the city found: of well over a thousand bulbs bought here, about one in a hundred actually came up.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Do not trust the export printing — most countries require an official phytosanitary certificate for bulbs, and the labelling sold on this market has been found misleading more than once.
Bulbs travel, cut flowers do not — the bulb season for buying runs through autumn for spring planting, which is when the stalls stock the widest range.
Early on a weekday — the run is short and narrow and fills solid once the tour groups reach the Muntplein end, usually by late morning.
Half of it is a souvenir shop — the wooden tulips and magnets are not a recent decline but the market's main trade now; the living stock is a minority of the frontage.

Things to do

1
Buy the bulbs with your eyes open
A bag costs little and packs flat, and it is the souvenir everyone leaves with. It is also the one the city itself tested: of more than a thousand bulbs bought on this market in 2019, roughly one percent flowered. Buy them as a keepsake rather than as a plant.
2
Look at where the stalls stand
Walk to the back of any stall and look down. The stalls stand over the canal itself, on piles and pontoons rather than on the quay, because flower sellers once moored their barges here and sold straight off the boats. The market still calls itself a floating market, but you can see for yourself that the stalls are fixed in place and do not float.