Almost everything worth seeing in Apeldoorn sits in the northwestern corner. Paleis Het Loo, the 1684 hunting retreat William III built to rival Versailles, dominates this quarter with its formal gardens, whose 13-metre King's Fountain was once the highest spouting fountain in Europe. Around the palace stretches Kroondomein Het Loo, the Crown Domain - 10,350 hectares of forest, heath, and farmland that belonged to the royal family from 1684 to 1975 and now belongs to the Dutch state. About three-quarters of the domain still closes to the public every autumn so the King can hunt. The surrounding streets are lined with stately villas tucked into greenery, the kind of neighborhood where mature beech trees shade the sidewalks and you can hear birds over the traffic.

Apenheul - literally 'ape sanctuary' - is unlike any other zoo. Opened in 1971 in Park Berg en Bos on the city's wooded western edge, it lets the primates loose. Squirrel monkeys, capuchins, and woolly monkeys roam freely through the forest where visitors walk, climbing on benches, occasionally on people, certainly on the trees overhead. The gorillas and orangutans live on islands separated by water, which neither species crosses. The whole park is built into a real forest rather than carved out of one, so the experience feels less like visiting a zoo and more like wandering through a primate-haunted woodland where the animals happen to have right-of-way. It's home to one of the largest gorilla groups in Europe.

The Netherlands, as the cliche goes, is flat. The Veluwe is not. East of the country's central polders, glacial pushing during the last ice age threw up a long ridge of sandy moraine - high enough, by Dutch standards, to be called hills. South of Apeldoorn, that elevation feeds the Loenense Watervallen. The Grote Loenense Waterval drops about 15 meters, making it the tallest waterfall in the Netherlands - a phrase that sounds like a joke until you stand at the bottom. The waterfalls are technically man-made, built in the 17th century to feed the Apeldoorns Kanaal and the water mills that the region's rare elevation made possible. They can be turned on and off. A short hike along the spreng - the engineered stream - takes you past smaller weirs and waterfalls, the entire infrastructure of medieval Dutch hydropower hiding in a forest.

Apeldoorn is built for cyclists, like most Dutch cities, but its proportions reward it. Twenty minutes by bike from the city center puts you in the forest. The local bus network meets at the railway station, with all lines converging at :16 and :46 past every hour - a small piece of Dutch logistical efficiency that takes the guesswork out of transfers. The A1 east-west motorway and the A50 running north-south meet at Apeldoorn, making it a natural road crossroads. Direct trains run hourly to Schiphol and Amsterdam, with international intercity service to Berlin via Hannover. In summer, a heritage steam train runs from the central station south to Dieren - 20 km of restored Dutch railway with a working locomotive.

Apeldoorn sits on the eastern shoulder of the Veluwe National Park, the largest area of relatively unspoiled forest in the country - wild boar, red deer, sandy heath, even areas of genuine drift-sand desert. The Kroller-Muller Museum, with one of the world's great collections of Van Gogh paintings, is a half-hour drive away in Hoge Veluwe National Park. The old Hanseatic cities of Deventer and Zutphen lie 15 km off in either direction, both reachable by regional train. Apeldoorn itself is spacious and green and family-friendly, at its best in summer - which is when the rest of the country tends to remember that the Veluwe is here and the trains run on time.