Imagine standing in Pieterburen in northern Groningen on a crisp morning in northern Groningen, looking out over flat polders, salt air on your skin, and maybe a seal in the distance. Somehow, this quiet shore is the beginning of something grand: roughly 500 kilometres of trail winding south through woods, heathland, rivers, villages—finally ending at Sint-Pietersberg, just south of Maastricht. This is the Pieterpad, the most famous long-distance walking route in the Netherlands.
A Bit of History
The idea was born in the late 1970s, when two Dutch women—Toos Goorhuis-Tjalsma from Tilburg in the south, and Bertje Jens from Groningen in the north—grew frustrated by the lack of long-distance walking paths in their homeland.
From about 1978 to 1983 they explored, plotted, tested stages, connecting existing paths, picking landscapes that showed off the diversity of the land.
The route was officially opened in 1983. Since then it has slowly evolved: slight adjustments of stages, small detours when infrastructure shifts, and improvements to signage and accommodation.
What You’ll See & How It Feels
Walking the Pieterpad is rarely rugged or remote—it’s not about trail-blazing, but about experiencing the changing Dutch landscape up close. Northern flatness gives you wide skies and polders; heathlands and woodlands in the centre; then gentle hills, river valleys, even vineyards, in Limburg. You pass through small towns and villages where time seems slower, where B&Bs, farmhouses and local cafes offer rest and character.
The trail is marked well (with the white-red markers of Dutch long-distance walking paths), and is divided into 26 stages of approx. 15-25 km each, so it’s accessible even if you can’t walk nonstop.
Estimating how many people walk the Pieterpad each year is tricky, because many people do just part of it, or break it up over many trips, and there's no central registry of walkers. But here are the best figures we have:
Some 30,000-50,000 people annually walk one or more of the 26 stages.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, interest and usage spiked: guidebook sales doubled, and people booking lodging on popular stages reported full occupancy more often.
So, safe to say: tens of thousands of people walk parts of or the whole Pieterpad every year.
The Pieterpad is more than a trail—it’s a mirror of the Netherlands. It shows you its history, its many landscapes, its rhythms. It brings people out into nature, connects rural to urban, past to present. After 40+ years, it continues to grow in popularity—not just among older walkers, but among younger people, couples, families, foreign hikers—especially once people discovered how beautiful and varied “Dutch wilderness” can be.
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