Take a step back in time at this remarkable museum, and come face to face with bygone ways of life in the fishing ports around the old Zuiderzee from 1880 until the sea was transformed into the freshwater IJsselmeer in 1932. It's in two sections, the Binnenmuseum (Indoor Museum) and the Buitenmuseum (Outdoor or Open-Air Museum), and you'll need to set aside a half-day at least to get the most out of them. Information desks, restrooms, souvenir stores, and restaurants are on-site.
You go by boat from a dock in Veerhaven beside Enkhuizen rail station, or from another dock beside the dike road from Enkhuizen to Lelystad, for the short ride across to the Open-Air Museum. This stands on the IJsselmeer shore at the northeast edge of town and can be accessed only by way of these boats. It contains 130 complete old buildings, including farmhouses, public buildings, stores, and a church, all furnished in period style and some of them with beautifully tiled interiors. These buildings have been shipped intact from lakeside villages or rebuilt on-site and combined to form a cobblestone-street village. The boat docks beside a pair of bottle-shaped limekilns, which employed seashells as the raw material for making quicklime. Then, you set off by foot to explore the scene, beginning with transplanted houses from the village of Zoutkamp.
To the north, a working windmill twirls its sails atop the dike. Nearby is a functioning smokehouse, where workers preserve herring by smoking them over smoldering wood chips before packing them in barrels. The village church hails from the former island of Wieringen, which now lies inland surrounded by polders northwest of Enkhuizen. In the sail maker's store, you can watch sails being made that later will fill with wind aboard traditional Zuiderzee boter and skûtsje sailing ships. In a group of houses from Urk on the IJsselmeer's eastern shore, daily scenes from around 1905 are reenacted. Don't miss the apothecary and its ornamental "gapers" -- painted heads with open mouths -- in the window. Among other buildings, all of them functioning concerns, are a grocery store, a cheese warehouse, a post office, a bakery, a painter's store, and a steam laundry.
Between the Open-Air Museum and the Indoor Museum is a recreation of the harbor at Marken, with smokehouses for preserving herring and eels standing on the dike, and fishing boats tied up at the dock. From here, you can walk a short way to the Indoor Museum, housed in the Peperhuis (Pepper House), a Dutch Renaissance building from 1625 that was used as offices and a warehouse by the Enkhuizen Chamber of the United East India Company (V.O.C.). In a former warehouse, you'll see numerous examples of the old fishing boats that provided the incomes on which Zuiderzee villagers largely depended, and old sailboats (including one that the kids can play on). Other rooms have been fitted out in the varied styles of houses from villages around the Zuiderzee and from other parts of Holland.
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