It begins at exactly ten o'clock when the carillon in the Waagtoren rings the hour. Stacks of yellow wheels - Goudas the size of millstones, smaller flat Edams - sit in geometric rows on the cobbles of the Waagplein. Then the kaasdragers appear in their white linen suits and lacquered straw hats, each guild assigned its own bright color: red, yellow, green, blue. They work in pairs, sliding lacquered wooden stretchers under the cheeses and trotting in a peculiar gliding rhythm that keeps the load from bouncing. A pair can move 160 kilograms in this gait. The whole performance is now choreography for tourists - the actual cheese trade left these cobbles long ago - but the choreography is real. The guild dates back centuries, the costumes are traditional, the weighing inside the Waag uses scales that recall the building's original purpose. From April through the second week of September, Friday morning, the show begins again.

Alkmaar grew on a sand ridge - one of the old beach lines that mark where the North Sea coast used to be before the dunes marched west. In a land of marsh and lake, that small rise of firm ground mattered. People built on it as early as the ninth century, and by 1254 the settlement had city rights. Two centuries later it was the largest town north of Amsterdam, with breweries lining the Lindegracht and a herring fleet using the small inland harbor. Walk the moat path on the west side now and you can read the city's defensive logic: an oval of water enclosing an oval of streets, with the Sint Laurenskerk rising on the highest point of the ridge. A gunpowder magazine from the 17th century is set into the embankment, later converted to an icehouse, and now home to a colony of bats. The bastions are planted with trees. The city walls are gone, but the shape they enforced remains.

When the Spanish duke Don Fadrique de Toledo arrived at the walls in late August, he had every reason to expect a quick capitulation. Haarlem had just fallen. Alkmaar's garrison was small. But the citizens had voted in a tense town meeting to hold out, and the surrounding sluices were in Dutch hands. Through September the assaults came and were thrown back. Then, in early October, the rebels did the thing the Spanish had not believed they would do: they opened the dykes. Salt water spread across the polders. Spanish supply lines turned to bog. On 8 October 1573 the army withdrew. The siege had lasted seven weeks. A small bronze statue called Victorientje, Little Victoria, stands today in a park near the canal, wings folded, modest in scale - the way the Dutch tend to commemorate things. The story it carries is not modest at all.

On the corner of Appelsteeg and Luttik Oudorp, a wooden-fronted house leans slightly toward the canal. It is the only surviving wooden facade in Alkmaar, and a small dark sphere is set into the wall above the windows. The house was struck by a Spanish cannonball during the siege. The Calvinist preacher Jan Arendsz lived there with his family at the time. None of them were hurt. Someone, afterward, decided the ball should stay where it landed. Four and a half centuries on it is still there - the kind of stubborn, specific memorial the Dutch prefer over grand monuments. A few streets south, the Sint Laurenskerk holds the early-Renaissance tomb of Floris V, the count of Holland who confirmed Alkmaar's harboring rights in 1285. Brabant Gothic on the outside, late medieval inside, the church marks the high point of the old sand ridge that made the town possible.

Step outside the moat and the landscape changes character. East of Alkmaar lies a chessboard of polders - lakes drained over the past four centuries by ranks of windmills, the oldest of which (the little Achtermeer, 1532) is recorded as the first lake in history drained by wind power alone. The Beemster polder, with its grid of geometric fields, joined the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1999. Some Dutch will tell you, half seriously, that it inspired the street plan of Manhattan. Closer in, four of the original six windmills still stand along the Hoornsevaart, where they once turned in coordinated relay to lift water out of the adjoining polder. And in a different register entirely, on an industrial estate fifteen minutes from the centre, a private collection called De Koog opens its doors on Friday evenings to anyone who wants to play a few dozen vintage pinball machines on free play. Alkmaar holds its surprises lightly.