Windmill Island Park
Windmill Island Park
Each May Holland hosts an annual Tulip Time Festival. Tulip planting and the festival began in 1930 when 250,000 tulips were planted for the event. Currently six million tulips are used throughout the city. Tulips are planted along many city streets, in city parks and outside municipal buildings as well as at tourist attractions like Dutch Village, the city-owned Windmill Island park, and at a large tulip farm named Veldheer Tulip Gardens.
It is normally held the second week of May, right when the numerous tulips
planted around the town are blooming. The festival lasts for over a week and
features three parades: the Volksparade, usually led by the state governor with
a broom as townspeople in Dutch costume wash the street; the Kinderparade,
featuring local children dressed in traditional Dutch costume and wooden shoes;
and the Muziekparade of marching bands that come from local high schools, to
regional to national. Some bands even come as far as New York to march in the
Muziekparade. The festival includes fireworks, musical shows and 1,000-2,000
klompen dancers, mostly females, dance on city streets in traditional wooden
shoes (klompen); some of them go on to represent Holland nationally. The
festival is so well entrenched in Holland's culture that members of the city's
large Mexican-American minority are frequently seen participating in the klompen
dances. Churches and schools are used to provide Dutch meals to tour groups.
About one million tourists visit Tulip Time each year. It has been ranked as
America's third largest town festival and was named Reader's Digest's best small
town festival.
Text from Wikipedia
Post Box
Sluice Gate
