Hoorn

Hoorn named the bottom of the world. In 1616 the navigator Willem Schouten, rounding the unknown cape at South America's tip, christened it after his hometown — and Cape Horn has carried this small Zuiderzee port into every atlas and sailor's oath since: no town of comparable size owns a more famous piece of geography. The gesture was in character, for Golden Age Hoorn was a giant — a chamber of the East India Company, home port of Bontekoe (whose ship's-boy adventures became Dutch literature's boyhood classic; the three bronze boys sit on the harbour wall), and the capital of West Friesland, whose states met in the splendid Statenlogement.

When the trade moved on, Hoorn kept the scenery: the Hoofdtoren harbour tower over a forest of masts (pleasure craft now, and the brown fleet of traditional sailing barges), warehouse rows, the Westfries Museum's merchant-house rooms, and the Roode Steen square where the cheese market has been ceremonially revived beneath J. P. Coen's contested statue — the town debates its empire honestly. The concert record's register of chamber concerts, choirs and visiting programmes fits the intimate scale; the steam tram to Medemblik adds the museum touch. A cape at the world's end, a harbour at Holland's heart: Hoorn's horizon was always bigger than its map.