Floriade – Holland & Belgium

Meet your Tour Leader at Sydney International Airport. Take a Qantas group flight to Amsterdam via London. Option to make your own travel arrangements and meet up at our hotel in Amsterdam on Day 2.

Arrive into Amsterdam, transfer to your hotel located near iconic Dam Square for five nights. Welcome dinner this evening to meet your fellow travellers.

Early departure this morning for Floriade 2022. Spend this day at the International Horticultural Exhibition Floriade, that is staged once every ten years in the Netherlands. Floriade 2022 will be the seventh such expo, held this time in Almere, built on a reclaimed parcel of land near Amsterdam. Participating countries and horticultural companies will showcase the world’s most exquisite horticulture: flowers, plants, trees, fruit and vegetables. The theme in 2022 is “Growing Green Cities”.

Keukenhof is our destination today, one of the world’s largest flower gardens located in the SW of Holland near Lisse. More than seven million bulbs are planted annually. It’s a spectacular sight. Spend the day exploring the exhibits including the large conservatories.

Early morning visit to the famous Aalsmeer flower auction. It’s the largest in the world, where more than 32 million flowers and plants are sold daily and sorted for worldwide shipment.
Afternoon visit to Hortus Bulborum, a museum garden of old and ‘lost’ bulbs including heirloom varieties that have been preserved and saved from extinction. It’s a treasure trove of 4,000 spring-flowering historical bulbs, some from the 16th century.

Walking tour this afternoon through the city centre and along the canals.

Morning visit to Het Loo, the former Royal residence, with sumptuously furnished interiors, where the Dutch Royal Family lived for three hundred years. Reconstructed ‘Baroque’ gardens breathe the atmosphere of their seventeenth century origins with fountains, parterre and espalier fruit trees, best viewed from the semicircular colonnades at the rear of the formal garden. Lunch included today.

Afternoon visit to the influential garden of Mien Ruys, the ‘Mother of Modernism’. This garden of 28 rooms (from 1924), shows how Mien Ruys experimented with plants and materials making her one of the most important garden architects of the twentieth century.

You will be buzzing with ideas today at this magnificent collection of model gardens of Appeltern. Garden design and trends, water gardens, Oriental gardens, courtyards, vegetable gardens, products, plants and materials; make this an exciting opportunity. Lunch included today.

Afternoon travel on to Bruges, one of Europe’s best preserved cities with cobble stones, market squares and canals. Check in to your boutique hotel in the heart of medieval Bruges for the next two nights

Enchantment this morning with a walking tour of Bruges. Economic prosperity of the 15th century brought rich merchants to Bruges. They lived in majestic city palaces filled with art treasures. Free afternoon to visit museums, art galleries and to explore the rich cultural history of this city.

Spend the day in Ghent and see the grandiose gabled, scrolled and chiselled architecture of the merchant houses on the waterfront. Grain and wool were the commodities that elevated Ghent from barren marshland to wealthy trade centre of the Middle Ages.

Ghent Floralies will be in full swing, a dynamic floral environment held in Citadelpark every four years and postponed from 2021. The theme for 2022 is ‘My Paradise, a Global Garden’.

Travel on to Brussels and check into your elegant hotel situated next to one of the most beautiful squares in Europe, for three nights.

Visit Kasteel Hex just outside Brussels, a working vegetable and flower farm. The kitchen garden has retained its authenticity over the centuries, one of the few examples that has been in cultivation for almost 250 years without interruption. Lunch included today.

Serres Royales is a complex of Victorian glasshouses built in classic style for King Leopold 11 in 1873, to house his collection of plants from the Congo. They have the appearance of a city of glass, situated in a beautiful park-like setting and filled with rare plants. Free afternoon to explore Brussels. Farewell dinner this evening.

Morning at leisure. Afternoon transfer to Brussels airport for return flights home via London.