Canals of Amsterdam

A 1914 cargo barge moored on the Prinsengracht that somebody lived on, opened up so you can walk through it. It takes about half an hour, costs from €10,00, and answers the question every visitor to Amsterdam ends up asking at some point: what is it actually like inside one […]

A museum of prostitution in a former brothel on the Oudezijds Achterburgwal, built around twelve recorded accounts by a sex worker who tells you what the job is actually like. Forty-five minutes, sixteen and over, open until one in the morning, from €14,50. It is the only place in De […]

The Oude Kerk was consecrated around 1306 and is the oldest building in Amsterdam — a medieval church that the red light district grew up around rather than the other way round. Rembrandt’s wife is buried under the floor, the wooden ceiling is the largest medieval vault in Europe, and […]

The third museum on the Museumplein, and the one people skip. The Stedelijk holds the Netherlands’ national collection of modern and contemporary art — the largest group of Malevich outside Russia, De Stijl, CoBrA, Warhol, Judd — in a nineteenth-century building with a white composite extension that Amsterdam has called […]

Rembrandt bought this house on the Jodenbreestraat in 1639, at the height of his success, and was declared insolvent in it nineteen years later. The inventory drawn up by his creditors listed every object in every room — which is why the house you walk through today is furnished almost […]

Two hundred paintings, five hundred drawings and seven hundred letters, by one man who sold almost nothing in his lifetime. The Van Gogh Museum on the Museumplein holds the largest collection of his work anywhere, and it is the most-reviewed attraction in Amsterdam — 4.8 out of 5 across more […]