In March 1997 this horse chestnut was dragged eighty metres across the Koekamp on steel plates, with a hundred tonnes of soil still around its roots, and the operation went into the Guinness Book of Records. It got there by being loved. Many of the trees on this side of the city vanished during the German occupation, burned in stoves for want of coal or felled to clear the line of a tank ditch, and this chestnut came through both. Fifty years later a road nearly did what the war had not. The plan for the Koningstunnel, drawn up in 1995, ran through the chestnut and through a monumental linden standing beside it. The city expected paperwork and got an argument: people were attached to these two trees in a way nobody had budgeted for. The tunnel route was shifted sideways to spare the linden. For the chestnut, engineers asked a stranger question, whether a tree that size could simply be moved, and the answer turned out to be yes. Steel plates went under the root ball and the whole thing was hauled slowly towards the Malieveld. It recovered. The crown is full again and a small sign at the foot of the trunk records what happened, ten minutes from Den Haag Centraal.
In bloomIn fruit
early May, when the white candles open across the whole crown
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Koekamp, at the Malieveld side, Den HaagYou can recognise it by the small sign at its foot recording how it was moved eighty metres on steel plates in 1997. It stands on the Koekamp, at the Malieveld side.
Free, on the Koekamp beside the Malieveld, at any time
Ten minute walk from Den Haag Centraal
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
- In the official register: Landelijk Register Monumentale Bomen (Bomenstichting), no. 1686937
- Landelijk Register Monumentale Bomen v2024 (Bomenstichting), register nr 1686937: De Koekampkastanje, Koekamp, Den Haag, planting band 1830-1840, r…
- Bomenstichting Den Haag, 2026-08-18: the local branch pointed us at the national register as the source for The Hague's monumental trees; register…
- services-eu1.arcgis.com
