Leiden, Netherlands

Leiden is a Dutch city of roughly 125,000 residents set along the Old Rhine between Amsterdam and The Hague. Leiden University, founded in 1575 as the oldest in the Netherlands, counts 16 Nobel Prize-winning professors among its faculty. The Pilgrim Fathers lived in exile here from 1609 to 1620 before sailing to America, and painter Rembrandt was born in the city in 1606 near a still-extant windmill workshop area. Each 3 October, residents mark the 1574 relief of the Spanish siege with herring and white bread, while the Hortus Botanicus, dating from 1590, remains the country's oldest botanical garden.