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 […]
An hour of live actors, dark rooms and Amsterdam’s nastier history played for laughs and jump scares. Not a museum, and it does not pretend to be. A new group starts every fifteen minutes in Dutch or English, the recommended age is ten and up, and it costs from €19,00. […]
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 […]
The building on the Dam was never meant to be a palace. It was built in the 1650s as Amsterdam’s city hall, at a moment when the city was probably the richest place in Europe and wanted a building to prove it. Napoleon’s brother turned it into a royal residence […]
The flower market on the Singel has been there since 1862 and is free to walk through, which are the two best things about it. It is also, honestly, no longer much of a flower market: fifteen or sixteen stalls, mostly souvenirs and packaged bulbs, and the last florist who […]
At 87 metres the Westertoren is the tallest church tower in Amsterdam, and the one Anne Frank could see from the attic on the Prinsengracht. Most guides will tell you to climb it for the best view of the canal belt. As of September 2026 you cannot: the tower is […]
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 […]
ARTIS opened in 1838 and is the oldest zoo in the Netherlands — a walled park of monumental buildings and old trees ten minutes from Waterlooplein, with an aquarium and a planetarium included in the ticket. From €29,49, rated 4.7 out of 5 by more than seventeen hundred visitors. Half […]
