Rain blows in off the North Sea most weeks, and kids still need somewhere to run. Every plan here has a roof: indoor playgrounds and trampoline parks for burning energy, museums with hands-on exhibits, theaters with shows for kids, libraries, and indoor water slides. A few sit in nearby towns, a short drive or train ride away. Here's what we checked.
The national archaeology museum of the Netherlands. Its central hall holds the Temple of Taffeh, a real Egyptian temple taken apart in Egypt and rebuilt here.
Galleries cover Egypt, the Near East, Greece, the Etruscans, Rome and the Netherlands from prehistory to the Middle Ages, with mummies, sarcophagi, imperial statues and ancient jewelry. Replicas, film clips and interactive displays help kids follow along.
Naturalis is the Dutch national museum of natural history, and a research institute too. Its galleries run from Life, which climbs from the depths of the ocean to a mountaintop, to Dinosaur age, home to Trix the T. rex, plus Ice age, Earth, Evolution and the forest of Suriname.
On the ground floor, LiveScience lets kids watch researchers and collection managers at work.
Tikibad is the indoor water park at Duinrell, with 21 waterslides, a wave pool, a lazy river, a whirlpool and Turkish baths, in water above 30°C.
Playa, the kids' water park, has child-friendly slides, a heated toddler pool and water no deeper than 15 cm, so small children can splash without a swimming certificate. In summer an outdoor area adds a heated pool, five slides and a water play house.
The city's main public library fills several floors of Richard Meier's white City Hall complex on Spui, around the largest atrium in the Netherlands.
The third floor is for children and teens, with a play area, books shelved by age, study spaces and a workshop room. Story sessions run there, including weekly read-alouds in Serbian. The fifth floor holds a theater and a green terrace with city views.
Laaktheater is a neighborhood theater with a round, steeply raked hall, and the venue says every seat has a clear view. The program mixes toddler shows, youth theater and dance with music, film and comedy, much of it made with people who live in Laak.
Kids can also join theater lessons or Bollywood dance classes, and school holidays bring festivals like Krokus Kabaal and Festival De Betovering.
Kooman's Poppentheater has played puppet shows every week since 1960, which makes it the oldest permanent puppet theater in the Netherlands. The puppets, sets and songs are all made in-house, and the nine children's shows follow Wasco the raccoon and his friends through new adventures.
The shows are cheerful and mildly suspenseful, with plenty of laughs, and not too babyish for older kids.
Bounce Valley Zoetermeer is an inflatable park where air cushions take the place of trampolines, across more than 1,000 m². Kids start in a bounce area with a pyramid, a jelly mountain and waves, then move on to an obstacle run, a ninja run, a jump tower, a climbing wall, extreme slides and light-up games like Catch the Light. Adults can sit on an air-conditioned terrace inside or jump along.
An inflatable park with more than 1000 m² of air cushions: waves, a pyramid, a climbing wall, slides and obstacle runs like Wipe Out and Ninja Run. Beyond the bouncing there is a net course for climbing and balancing at height, interactive games such as Tag & Run, and GlowGolf, an 18-hole mini golf played in the dark. Built for burning energy on a rainy day.
FunZone Delft is a covered indoor playground with a climbing volcano, a family slide, a toboggan run, a Snowglider, a ball cannon and extra-high trampolines. A separate toddler corner gives the youngest their own space.
Parents can watch from the café terrace, which serves coffee and sandwiches and has free Wi-Fi. At least one adult has to stay for the whole visit.
Play & Bounce is an indoor play hall inside the Scheveningen Pier, with two zones. The soft play park, for kids up to 10, has climbing blocks, giant soft Lego bricks, a ball pit and slides.
The trampoline park has eight large trampolines plus four side trampolines, so kids can bounce off the walls too. It pairs well with a morning on the beach below.
Kids Eiland is a 3,000 m² indoor play center in the Megastores mall. Toddlers get a soft play area with big blocks; older kids get a freefall slide, an elastic climbing tower, trampolines, rope bridges and bouncy castles.
Nothing is motorized, so every moving part runs on kid power. The café serves fresh sandwiches, snacks and coffee, and the whole menu is halal.
Zuiderparadijs is an indoor playground on a first floor, reached by lift. Kids race down multi-lane slides and a power tower, bounce on trampolines, climb towers with rope bridges and tunnels, and build with giant blocks.
Parents can drive the electric minicar circuit too. There is a big ball pit, a soft toddler corner with its own trampoline, and an arcade room for older kids.
EPICX Den Haag is an indoor play center where one ticket covers several activity zones. Kids can run across the Mega Bounce, a giant inflatable, jump on the interactive Active Pixel floor, explore the Fun House and play laser tag.
Toddlers get a zone of their own, there is a Clay Café Lab for creative play, and mini e-karts are an add-on for older kids.
Planet Jump & Play is a trampoline park inside a former church. Kids bounce across the trampoline courts, and toddlers get a separate play area of their own, away from the bigger jumpers.
It sits a short walk from Kunstmuseum Den Haag, so it pairs easily with a museum morning when the weather turns.
An indoor play center built around a big climbing frame with slides, ball pits and trampolines. Toddlers get their own separate zone with a ball waterfall and a pirate ship.
Extras cost a little more: kids' cars, a carousel, laser tag under the climbing frame, the LavaLand pixel floor and four bowling lanes. Parents watch from the café, which looks out over the play area.
An indoor playground with a Fun House climbing frame for kids from 4, packed with an air slide, a toboggan run, giant building blocks and a ball shower. A glow-in-the-dark jungle of life-size animals holds laser tag and mini golf, and there is a trampoline zone.
Under-4s get their own toddler zone with a ball pit, mini trampoline and slides. Parents can watch from the café.
An indoor play center at the De Uithof sports complex, built around a big climbing frame with tunnels, slides and an elastic climbing tower. Kids can also bounce in the trampoline zone, play in the ball pit, build with Fun Blocks and take each other on at laser game.
A separate toddler zone has soft mats, mini slides and its own ball pit for crawlers and early walkers.
Royal Delft is the last of the 17th-century earthenware factories in Delft still making Delft Blue by hand. Kids watch master painters at work, walk through the factory from the first clay to the final brushstroke, and see the tulip pyramid and royal collection in the museum rooms. Extras include a tile-painting workshop, a children's treasure hunt and a kids' audio tour.
A small indoor LEGO attraction on the Scheveningen boulevard, near the Kurhaus and the Pier, rather than a theme park. Kids ride the Imagination Express scoring points with a magic wand, watch a film in the 4D cinema, play in the DUPLO Park and Pirate Island soft play, and train in the NINJAGO zone. MINILAND rebuilds The Hague's landmarks from more than 1.5 million bricks.
TU Delft Science Centre is the university's science center on the Delft campus. Its exhibition is closed while a new one is built, so visits run through booked programs. In the Tech Studio, a child and one adult work as a pair: programming a MIRTE robot built at TU Delft, turning recycled plastic into a spinner, or designing imaginary creatures inspired by the ARIA artwork in the entrance hall.
Museum Voorlinden is a private museum of modern and contemporary art, built around the Caldic Collection, which includes works by Yayoi Kusama, Ron Mueck, Louise Bourgeois and James Turrell.
It sits on a country estate by the Wassenaar dunes, with gardens by Piet Oudolf and woods, meadows and water to walk after the galleries. The Clingenbosch sculpture garden nearby holds more than sixty modern sculptures.
The Mauritshuis is a 17th-century palace on the Hofvijver pond, beside the Binnenhof, filled with Dutch and Flemish Old Masters. Kids can stand in front of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Fabritius' Goldfinch and Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.
The galleries are intimate rooms with damask wallpaper, chandeliers and painted ceilings, and over 200 masterpieces are on show.
The Prison Gate was the entrance to the castle of the Counts of Holland, then for centuries a prison. A museum since 1882, it holds old cells and the largest collection of punishment and torture instruments in the Netherlands.
In the courthouse exhibition, kids feel how heavy a leg block is, see how thumbscrews work, and end the visit playing judge.
The museum fills the Frans Halsstraat tram depot, built in 1906 and used by the city's tram company until 1983. Inside stand about 30 trams that all served the city between 1905 and 1993, plus changing exhibitions drawn from its photo archive.
More than 100 volunteers restore the trams and drive them, and visitors can ride one on a round trip through the city.
Museum Beelden aan Zee is a sculpture museum built into the dunes of Scheveningen, beneath the 1826 Pavilion Von Wied, with a view of the sea. Inside are changing exhibitions and a rotating selection from the collection, from small figures to monumental pieces.
Outside are sculpture terraces and patios, and on the boulevard 23 fairy-tale sculptures by Tom Otterness fill a large outdoor terrace.
Muzee tells the story of Scheveningen's fishing village and seaside resort from inside an 1877 school building. Kids can walk through a replica of an old village street, look over model ships from the fishing fleet, and see the straw beach chairs of early beach days.
The sea hall holds hundreds of shells, crabs, deep-sea squids and fossils millions of years old. The guides are former fishermen.
The Children's Book Museum shares the Royal Library building with the Museum of Literature. Kids play inside book worlds: treasure hunting with Bear and pie baking with Pig in I am Frog, from Max Velthuijs's books, or roaming Papiria to beat the Ink Gobbler and write their own story, poem or comic. Under-7s get The Storytime Tent and the clamber-and-play ABC with the Animals and Me.
More than 120 prints by M.C. Escher hang in the former winter palace of Queen Emma on Lange Voorhout, from Day and Night to the seven-meter Metamorphosis III.
Kids get the most from the second floor, "Through Escher's Eyes": they turn giant or tiny in a few seconds, make their own tessellation, play with impossible figures and walk an Op-art room where the artworks seem to move.
The Louwman Museum holds more than 275 rare and iconic automobiles, from the first motorized vehicles to designs far ahead of their time, plus car posters, sculptures, trophies and miniatures.
Kids get a free printed treasure hunt and pen on arrival: each answer found in the halls gives a letter toward a hidden word, and a solved sheet earns a small gift at the museum shop.
Panorama Mesdag is a rotunda built around one painting: a 360-degree view of the sea, beach, dunes and fishing village of Scheveningen, 114.5 meters around and 14.6 meters high, the largest painting in the Netherlands. Kids climb a spiral staircase above an artificial dune to see it as if standing on Scheveningen's highest dune in 1881.
Side galleries show more work by Hendrik Willem Mesdag and Sientje Mesdag-van Houten.
An art museum in a Berlage building, with daylit galleries of modern art, fashion and applied arts, and as many as 300 works by Piet Mondrian.
Kids head for Chambers of Wonder (Wonderkamers): in pairs, with a tablet, they play a game through themed rooms, dance with Mondrian and reach a maze where they design their own room. A kids' audio tour covers 40 works, from Monet to Van Gogh.
Museon-Omniversum pairs a hands-on museum with the Dome, a giant-screen film theater. The One Planet Expo walks kids through the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals with interactive exhibits, while themed rooms and changing exhibitions cover nature, culture and science, drawn from a collection of over 90,000 objects.
It sits next to the Kunstmuseum in Zorgvliet. Under-4s are welcome but need more guidance at the exhibits.
Rain blows in off the North Sea most weeks, and kids still need somewhere to run. Every plan here has a roof: indoor playgrounds and trampoline parks for burning energy, museums with hands-on exhibits, theaters with shows for kids, libraries, and indoor water slides. A few sit in nearby towns, a short drive or train ride away. Here's what we checked.
The national archaeology museum of the Netherlands. Its central hall holds the Temple of Taffeh, a real Egyptian temple taken apart in Egypt and rebuilt here.
Galleries cover Egypt, the Near East, Greece, the Etruscans, Rome and the Netherlands from prehistory to the Middle Ages, with mummies, sarcophagi, imperial statues and ancient jewelry. Replicas, film clips and interactive displays help kids follow along.
Naturalis is the Dutch national museum of natural history, and a research institute too. Its galleries run from Life, which climbs from the depths of the ocean to a mountaintop, to Dinosaur age, home to Trix the T. rex, plus Ice age, Earth, Evolution and the forest of Suriname.
On the ground floor, LiveScience lets kids watch researchers and collection managers at work.
Tikibad is the indoor water park at Duinrell, with 21 waterslides, a wave pool, a lazy river, a whirlpool and Turkish baths, in water above 30°C.
Playa, the kids' water park, has child-friendly slides, a heated toddler pool and water no deeper than 15 cm, so small children can splash without a swimming certificate. In summer an outdoor area adds a heated pool, five slides and a water play house.
The city's main public library fills several floors of Richard Meier's white City Hall complex on Spui, around the largest atrium in the Netherlands.
The third floor is for children and teens, with a play area, books shelved by age, study spaces and a workshop room. Story sessions run there, including weekly read-alouds in Serbian. The fifth floor holds a theater and a green terrace with city views.
Laaktheater is a neighborhood theater with a round, steeply raked hall, and the venue says every seat has a clear view. The program mixes toddler shows, youth theater and dance with music, film and comedy, much of it made with people who live in Laak.
Kids can also join theater lessons or Bollywood dance classes, and school holidays bring festivals like Krokus Kabaal and Festival De Betovering.
Kooman's Poppentheater has played puppet shows every week since 1960, which makes it the oldest permanent puppet theater in the Netherlands. The puppets, sets and songs are all made in-house, and the nine children's shows follow Wasco the raccoon and his friends through new adventures.
The shows are cheerful and mildly suspenseful, with plenty of laughs, and not too babyish for older kids.
Bounce Valley Zoetermeer is an inflatable park where air cushions take the place of trampolines, across more than 1,000 m². Kids start in a bounce area with a pyramid, a jelly mountain and waves, then move on to an obstacle run, a ninja run, a jump tower, a climbing wall, extreme slides and light-up games like Catch the Light. Adults can sit on an air-conditioned terrace inside or jump along.
An inflatable park with more than 1000 m² of air cushions: waves, a pyramid, a climbing wall, slides and obstacle runs like Wipe Out and Ninja Run. Beyond the bouncing there is a net course for climbing and balancing at height, interactive games such as Tag & Run, and GlowGolf, an 18-hole mini golf played in the dark. Built for burning energy on a rainy day.
FunZone Delft is a covered indoor playground with a climbing volcano, a family slide, a toboggan run, a Snowglider, a ball cannon and extra-high trampolines. A separate toddler corner gives the youngest their own space.
Parents can watch from the café terrace, which serves coffee and sandwiches and has free Wi-Fi. At least one adult has to stay for the whole visit.
Play & Bounce is an indoor play hall inside the Scheveningen Pier, with two zones. The soft play park, for kids up to 10, has climbing blocks, giant soft Lego bricks, a ball pit and slides.
The trampoline park has eight large trampolines plus four side trampolines, so kids can bounce off the walls too. It pairs well with a morning on the beach below.
Kids Eiland is a 3,000 m² indoor play center in the Megastores mall. Toddlers get a soft play area with big blocks; older kids get a freefall slide, an elastic climbing tower, trampolines, rope bridges and bouncy castles.
Nothing is motorized, so every moving part runs on kid power. The café serves fresh sandwiches, snacks and coffee, and the whole menu is halal.
Zuiderparadijs is an indoor playground on a first floor, reached by lift. Kids race down multi-lane slides and a power tower, bounce on trampolines, climb towers with rope bridges and tunnels, and build with giant blocks.
Parents can drive the electric minicar circuit too. There is a big ball pit, a soft toddler corner with its own trampoline, and an arcade room for older kids.
EPICX Den Haag is an indoor play center where one ticket covers several activity zones. Kids can run across the Mega Bounce, a giant inflatable, jump on the interactive Active Pixel floor, explore the Fun House and play laser tag.
Toddlers get a zone of their own, there is a Clay Café Lab for creative play, and mini e-karts are an add-on for older kids.
Planet Jump & Play is a trampoline park inside a former church. Kids bounce across the trampoline courts, and toddlers get a separate play area of their own, away from the bigger jumpers.
It sits a short walk from Kunstmuseum Den Haag, so it pairs easily with a museum morning when the weather turns.
An indoor play center built around a big climbing frame with slides, ball pits and trampolines. Toddlers get their own separate zone with a ball waterfall and a pirate ship.
Extras cost a little more: kids' cars, a carousel, laser tag under the climbing frame, the LavaLand pixel floor and four bowling lanes. Parents watch from the café, which looks out over the play area.
An indoor playground with a Fun House climbing frame for kids from 4, packed with an air slide, a toboggan run, giant building blocks and a ball shower. A glow-in-the-dark jungle of life-size animals holds laser tag and mini golf, and there is a trampoline zone.
Under-4s get their own toddler zone with a ball pit, mini trampoline and slides. Parents can watch from the café.
An indoor play center at the De Uithof sports complex, built around a big climbing frame with tunnels, slides and an elastic climbing tower. Kids can also bounce in the trampoline zone, play in the ball pit, build with Fun Blocks and take each other on at laser game.
A separate toddler zone has soft mats, mini slides and its own ball pit for crawlers and early walkers.
Royal Delft is the last of the 17th-century earthenware factories in Delft still making Delft Blue by hand. Kids watch master painters at work, walk through the factory from the first clay to the final brushstroke, and see the tulip pyramid and royal collection in the museum rooms. Extras include a tile-painting workshop, a children's treasure hunt and a kids' audio tour.
A small indoor LEGO attraction on the Scheveningen boulevard, near the Kurhaus and the Pier, rather than a theme park. Kids ride the Imagination Express scoring points with a magic wand, watch a film in the 4D cinema, play in the DUPLO Park and Pirate Island soft play, and train in the NINJAGO zone. MINILAND rebuilds The Hague's landmarks from more than 1.5 million bricks.
TU Delft Science Centre is the university's science center on the Delft campus. Its exhibition is closed while a new one is built, so visits run through booked programs. In the Tech Studio, a child and one adult work as a pair: programming a MIRTE robot built at TU Delft, turning recycled plastic into a spinner, or designing imaginary creatures inspired by the ARIA artwork in the entrance hall.
Museum Voorlinden is a private museum of modern and contemporary art, built around the Caldic Collection, which includes works by Yayoi Kusama, Ron Mueck, Louise Bourgeois and James Turrell.
It sits on a country estate by the Wassenaar dunes, with gardens by Piet Oudolf and woods, meadows and water to walk after the galleries. The Clingenbosch sculpture garden nearby holds more than sixty modern sculptures.
The Mauritshuis is a 17th-century palace on the Hofvijver pond, beside the Binnenhof, filled with Dutch and Flemish Old Masters. Kids can stand in front of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Fabritius' Goldfinch and Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.
The galleries are intimate rooms with damask wallpaper, chandeliers and painted ceilings, and over 200 masterpieces are on show.
The Prison Gate was the entrance to the castle of the Counts of Holland, then for centuries a prison. A museum since 1882, it holds old cells and the largest collection of punishment and torture instruments in the Netherlands.
In the courthouse exhibition, kids feel how heavy a leg block is, see how thumbscrews work, and end the visit playing judge.
The museum fills the Frans Halsstraat tram depot, built in 1906 and used by the city's tram company until 1983. Inside stand about 30 trams that all served the city between 1905 and 1993, plus changing exhibitions drawn from its photo archive.
More than 100 volunteers restore the trams and drive them, and visitors can ride one on a round trip through the city.
Museum Beelden aan Zee is a sculpture museum built into the dunes of Scheveningen, beneath the 1826 Pavilion Von Wied, with a view of the sea. Inside are changing exhibitions and a rotating selection from the collection, from small figures to monumental pieces.
Outside are sculpture terraces and patios, and on the boulevard 23 fairy-tale sculptures by Tom Otterness fill a large outdoor terrace.
Muzee tells the story of Scheveningen's fishing village and seaside resort from inside an 1877 school building. Kids can walk through a replica of an old village street, look over model ships from the fishing fleet, and see the straw beach chairs of early beach days.
The sea hall holds hundreds of shells, crabs, deep-sea squids and fossils millions of years old. The guides are former fishermen.
The Children's Book Museum shares the Royal Library building with the Museum of Literature. Kids play inside book worlds: treasure hunting with Bear and pie baking with Pig in I am Frog, from Max Velthuijs's books, or roaming Papiria to beat the Ink Gobbler and write their own story, poem or comic. Under-7s get The Storytime Tent and the clamber-and-play ABC with the Animals and Me.
More than 120 prints by M.C. Escher hang in the former winter palace of Queen Emma on Lange Voorhout, from Day and Night to the seven-meter Metamorphosis III.
Kids get the most from the second floor, "Through Escher's Eyes": they turn giant or tiny in a few seconds, make their own tessellation, play with impossible figures and walk an Op-art room where the artworks seem to move.
The Louwman Museum holds more than 275 rare and iconic automobiles, from the first motorized vehicles to designs far ahead of their time, plus car posters, sculptures, trophies and miniatures.
Kids get a free printed treasure hunt and pen on arrival: each answer found in the halls gives a letter toward a hidden word, and a solved sheet earns a small gift at the museum shop.
Panorama Mesdag is a rotunda built around one painting: a 360-degree view of the sea, beach, dunes and fishing village of Scheveningen, 114.5 meters around and 14.6 meters high, the largest painting in the Netherlands. Kids climb a spiral staircase above an artificial dune to see it as if standing on Scheveningen's highest dune in 1881.
Side galleries show more work by Hendrik Willem Mesdag and Sientje Mesdag-van Houten.
An art museum in a Berlage building, with daylit galleries of modern art, fashion and applied arts, and as many as 300 works by Piet Mondrian.
Kids head for Chambers of Wonder (Wonderkamers): in pairs, with a tablet, they play a game through themed rooms, dance with Mondrian and reach a maze where they design their own room. A kids' audio tour covers 40 works, from Monet to Van Gogh.
Museon-Omniversum pairs a hands-on museum with the Dome, a giant-screen film theater. The One Planet Expo walks kids through the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals with interactive exhibits, while themed rooms and changing exhibitions cover nature, culture and science, drawn from a collection of over 90,000 objects.
It sits next to the Kunstmuseum in Zorgvliet. Under-4s are welcome but need more guidance at the exhibits.
