Leiden

Leiden chose a university over a tax break, and the choice made the Dutch Enlightenment. Offered a reward for surviving the Spanish siege of 1574 — during which the city starved rather than surrender, relieved at last when the dikes were cut and the fleet sailed over the fields — Leiden asked not for exemption from taxes but for a university: founded 1575, the country's first, it schooled Descartes' debates, Boerhaave's medicine and a dozen Nobel laureates, and still sets the town's tempo. The deliverance is re-enacted every 3 October, when the whole city eats herring, white bread and hutspot — the stew allegedly found simmering in the abandoned Spanish camp — history as an annual menu.

Rembrandt was born here, a miller's son by the Rijn, and the young Pilgrims lived here for a decade before the Mayflower — their American Thanksgiving has a Leiden address, commemorated in the Pieterskerk. The town wears poetry on its walls, literally: over a hundred wall poems in dozens of languages painted on its gables. The concert record's register — churches, choirs, cultural centres, student and visiting ensembles — matches a city where the academic year is the liturgical one. A siege survived, a university claimed, a painter launched: Leiden drives the hardest bargains in Dutch history, and wins them.