Most people who come to Emmen come for one reason. The zoo - now called Wildlands Adventure Zoo - sits a fifteen-minute walk from the central train station, with directions helpfully posted along the way. Almost everyone follows them. It is fair to say that without the zoo, this corner of Drenthe would see far fewer day-trippers. But the people who stay long enough to look around find a small Dutch city sitting on top of unexpected layers: a Stone Age dolmen tucked inside the city park, an American land-art masterpiece in an abandoned sand quarry, a wooded glacial ridge running away to the north, and a sprawl of peat colonies on the flat ground to the south. The zoo is the obvious draw. The reason to linger is everything around it.
Emmen is built for arriving by train. Two stations serve the city, Emmen central and Emmen Zuid to the south, each connected twice an hour to Zwolle and from there to the rest of the Dutch rail network. From Amsterdam the journey takes about two and a half hours with one change. Across the street from the central station is the main bus terminal, where you can pick up the fast 300 to Groningen (up to six per hour), the 27 from Hoogeveen, the 21 or 22 from Assen, or - on weekdays - the 922 across the border from Meppen in Germany. You can rent a bicycle at the station. Most visitors do not bother, because the zoo is so close. The city center, with its monumental Grote Kerk and its 1949 Pauluskerk that looks far older than it is, lies between the station and the zoo entrance. So you walk through the town whether you mean to or not.
Emmen's old core is small but rewards a slow walk. The Grote Kerk, also called the Grote of Pancratiuskerk, carries a Romanesque tower whose origins reach back to the twelfth century, even though most of the building is newer. The Pauluskerk, completed in 1949, is a registered national monument because of its distinctive design rather than its age. An 1878 synagogue in the center retains its original interiors, a survival rare enough in the wider region to count as a small miracle. Two Saxon farm buildings remain inside the city limits, including one on the market square that now houses a café - you can have a coffee in a building that was working farmland when the rest of Emmen was still scattered hamlets. Beyond the monumental sights, the city center is essentially a shopping district. Locals from across northern Drenthe often prefer it to the provincial capital Assen, finding it more cosy and easier to wander.
FC Emmen play in the Dutch second tier, the Eerste Divisie, after being relegated in 2023. Their home ground is De Oude Meerdijk in the business park 3 km east of the city center, capacity 8,600. The East Stand seats are arranged to display the flag of Drenthe province, the only such tribute to a regional banner in Dutch top-flight football. Match tickets are usually available on the day at the stadium for a relatively painless price. The other club worth knowing is E&O, a professional handball side that has won the Dutch national championship five times - an unusual concentration of indoor success for a city of this size. If you are visiting in the right season, the Gouden Pijl criterium brings serious international road cycling to the streets, accompanied by a weekend of pop concerts. December brings the historic Oliebollen Race at Speedway Emmen, a stock-car event named for the deep-fried New Year's pastries the Dutch eat by the bagful.
Emmen sits at the southernmost tip of the Hondsrug, the Dog Ridge - a low chain of glacial hills, wooded and rolling enough to feel almost foreign in a country defined by its flatness. The Hondsrug is one of the great cycling and rambling areas of the Netherlands. It is also where you find the largest concentration in the country of hunebedden, the Stone Age burial chambers built around 3500 BC from boulders the glaciers left behind. Most of the Netherlands' fifty-four hunebedden are on this ridge; several, remarkably, sit inside Emmen's built-up area. The most famous in the city is Hunebed D45 in the Emmerdennen forest. To the south and east, the land drops away into the dead-flat veenkoloniën - the peat colonies, where canals run straight to the horizon. To the southwest lies medieval Coevorden, with its preserved center. The whole region is bicycle country. So is the rest of Drenthe.
Outside the city, in an old sand quarry once owned by the De Boer family, sits Broken Circle/Spiral Hill - a 1971 earthwork by the American artist Robert Smithson. It is the only large-scale piece he ever built outside the United States, made the summer after he completed Spiral Jetty in Utah in 1970. The work pairs a 140-foot canal-cut circle of yellow and white sand jutting into a quarry lake with a 75-foot spiral hill of dark topsoil beside it. Smithson chose Emmen because he was fascinated by the constructed Dutch landscape and by the nearby hunebedden. He died in 1973, before he could see what would happen to his gift. Today the site opens to the public on a small number of days each year. If your visit falls on one of them, take the chance. The piece is one of the major works of twentieth-century land art, and it is quietly sitting in a Drenthe sand pit.
Emmen sits at 52.78 degrees north, 6.91 degrees east, at the southern end of the Hondsrug ridge in southeastern Drenthe. From cruising altitude the city reads as a tidy planned grid set into mixed woodland, with the green sweep of the Emmerdennen forest just inside its eastern edge and the long parallel canals of the peat colonies stretching south. The A37 motorway runs east-west south of the city and crosses into Germany about 10 km east as the B402 / European route E233. The N34 expressway connects to Groningen 45 minutes north. Wildlands Zoo lies just north of the central train station; the De Oude Meerdijk stadium and the Broken Circle / Spiral Hill earthwork sit a few kilometers east. Nearest airport: Groningen Airport Eelde (EHGG) lies 50 km north. Recommended viewing altitude 3,000 to 5,000 feet for the contrast between the wooded ridge and the dead-flat peat country to the south.