Utrecht, home of Miffy, is more than a great alternative to Amsterdam

Once the tour buses have finished the spring trips to colourful tulip fields, dazzling in blazes of red, magenta and purple, much of the Netherlands returns to its favourite pastime, arguing over how to save Amsterdam from drunken stag parties, drugs, a surplus of souvenir shops and all the other detritus of tourism overload.

This is, of course, not unique to Amsterdam. European cities from Barcelona to Venice also struggle with mass tourism, enacting tourist taxes and other means to limit visitation. Yet few cities have been as single-minded about protecting local neighbourhoods and businesses as Amsterdam, which has banned new hotel construction and conversion of buildings into tourist lodgings. Two years ago, it launched a campaign urging visitors to stay away.

Amsterdam (population: 900,000) has discussed limiting tourists to 20 million overnight stays a year. Utrecht, in contrast, receives about 2.3 per cent of that, an estimated 451,000 overnight visitors annually, including Dutch tourists, easily handled in a friendly city of 400,000.

Only 45km from Amsterdam, the country’s fourth-largest city claims an even richer history, dating back to Roman times. My partner is Dutch, and we spend parts of each year in Utrecht, savouring its charming canals, historic brick buildings and cobbled streets, facets of a city that was flourishing while Amsterdam was still a fishing village. It also regularly features on lists of the world’s most bicycle-friendly cities, with a network of routes that follow canals through green belts filled with trees, seasonal flowers, ducks and geese, and lead further afield, to forests and windmills.