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Next: about 26 Mar 2027

Alkmaar cheese market season opens

The first Friday of the Alkmaar cheese market, where guild porters carry wheels of Gouda on barrows to the weigh house.

Photographed at Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Photo: Alf van Beem, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Cheeses for Alkmaar cheese market season opens

Alkmaar's cheese market is held on Friday mornings from the end of March or early April to the end of September, on the Waagplein in front of the old weigh house. The cheese porters' guild, founded in 1593, still runs it: porters in white with red, blue, green or yellow straw hats carry the cheeses on wooden barrows to be weighed, and traders seal prices with handjeklap, a ritual of clapping hands. The wheels on display are mostly Gouda-type cheeses, laid out in rows on the square. In recent years the season has opened on the last Friday of March, with a guest ringing the bell.

The cheeses

EdamThe ball-shaped cheese of North Holland, also shown.

Also part of it, and being written: Gouda cheese (The round yellow wheels laid out on the Waagplein.).

About this page

Written by the EveryCheese desk with AI assistance. Background: "Dutch cheese markets" on Wikipedia. Customs differ from place to place and family to family. If this is your tradition and we have it wrong, tell us.

Photo credits on this page

The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.

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