Het Schielandshuis

The Schielandshuis stands out for its ornate, seventeenth-century Dutch classicist facade, decorated with sandstone carvings that look entirely out of place among the glass towers of modern Rotterdam. Built in sixteen sixty-five, it served as the headquarters for the Schieland Water Board, the authority responsible for maintaining dikes and dams in the region. Napoleon Bonaparte stayed here in eighteen eleven, and the building remains one of the few structures in the city center that survived the German bombing of nineteen forty.