• Amsterdam
AMSTERDAM is a beguiling capital, a compact mix of the provincial and
the cosmopolitan. It has a welcoming attitude towards visitors and a
uniquely youthful orientation. For many, however, its world-class
museums and galleries - notably the Rijksmuseum, with its collection of
seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, and the Van Gogh Museum - are
reason enough to visit.
Amsterdam was founded on a dam on the river Amstel in the thirteenth
century. During the Reformation it rose in stature, taking trade away
from Antwerp and becoming a haven for its religious refugees. Having
shaken off the yoke of the Spanish, the city went from strength to
strength in the seventeenth century, becoming the centre of a vast
trading empire with colonies in Southeast Asia. Amsterdam accommodated
its expansion with the cobweb of canals that gives the city its
distinctive and elegant shape today. Come the eighteenth century,
Amsterdam went into gentle decline, re-emerging as a fashionable focus
for the alternative movements of the 1960s. Despite a backlash in the
1980s, the city still takes a uniquely progressive approach to social
issues and culture, with a buzz of open-air summer events, intimate
clubs and bars, and relaxed attitude to soft drugs
The City
Amsterdam is a small city, and, although the concentric canal system can
be initially confusing, finding your bearings is straightforward. The
medieval core boasts the best of the city's bustling streetlife and is
home to shops, many bars and restaurants, fanning south from the
nineteenth-century Centraal Station , one of Amsterdam's most resonant
landmarks and a focal point for urban life. Come summer there's no
livelier part of the city, as street performers compete for attention
with the trams that converge dangerously from all sides. From here,
Damrak storms into the heart of the city, an unenticing avenue lined
with overpriced restaurants and bobbing canal boats, and flanked on the
left first by the Beurs , designed at the turn of the twentieth century
by the leading light of the Dutch modern movement, H.P. Berlage, and
then by the enormous De Bijenkorf department store.
To the left off Damrak, the infamous red-light district , stretching
across two canals - Oudezijds (abbreviated to O.Z.) Voorburgwal and O.Z.
Achterburgwal - is one of the real sights of the city, thronged in high
season with visitors keen to discover just how shocking it all is.
Though seamy and seedy, the legalized prostitution on flagrant display
here is world-renowned. The two canals, with their narrow connecting
passages, are thronged with neon-lit "window brothels", and at busy
times the crass on-street haggling over the price of various sex acts is
drowned out by a surprisingly festive atmosphere.
Just behind the Beurs off Warmoesstraat, the precincts of the Oude Kerk
(Mon-Sat 11am-5pm, Sun 1-5pm; ¬3.60; www.oudekerk.nl ) offer a
reverential peace after the excesses of the red-light district; it's a
bare, mostly fourteenth-century church with some beautifully carved
misericords in the choir and the memorial tablet of Rembrandt's first
wife, Saskia van Uylenburg. Nearby, the Amstelkring , at the northern
end of Oudezijds Voorburgwal, was once the principal Catholic place of
worship in the city and is now a museum (Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 1-5pm;
¬4.50) commemorating the days when Catholics had to confine their
worship to the privacy of their homes. Known as "Our Dear Lord in the
Attic", it occupies the loft of a wealthy merchant's house, together
with those of two smaller houses behind it. Just beyond, Zeedijk , once
haunt of Amsterdam's drug dealers, leads through to the open Nieuwmarkt
, where the turreted Waag was originally part of the city's
fortifications, later becoming the civic weigh-house. Kloveniersburgwal
, which leads south, was the outer of the three eastern canals of
sixteenth-century Amsterdam and boasts, on the left, one of the city's
most impressive canal houses, built for the Trip family in 1662. Further
up on the right, the Oudemanhuispoort passage, once part of an almshouse,
is now filled with secondhand bookstalls.
At the southern end of Damrak, the Dam (or Dam Square), where the Amstel
was first dammed, is the centre of the city, its tusk-like War Memorial
serving as a meeting place for tourists. On the western side, the Royal
Palace (June-Oct daily 11am-5pm; Nov-May opening hours variable; ¬4.30;
www.kon-paleisamsterdam.nl ) was originally built as the city hall in
the mid-seventeenth century. It received its royal monicker in 1808 when
Napoleon's brother Louis commandeered it as the one building fit for a
king. He was forced to abdicate in 1810, leaving behind a sizeable
amount of the Empire furniture. Vying for importance is the adjacent
Nieuwe Kerk (open only during exhibitions; www.nieuwekerk.nl ), a
fifteenth-century structure rebuilt several times, which is now used
only for exhibitions and state occasions. Inside rest numerous names
from Dutch history, among them the seventeenth-century naval hero
Admiral de Ruyter, who lies in an opulent tomb in the choir, and the
poet Vondel, commemorated by a small urn near the entrance.
South of Dam Square, Rokin follows the old course of the Amstel River,
lined with grandiose nineteenth-century mansions. Running parallel,
Kalverstraat is a monotonous strip of clothes shops, halfway down which,
at no. 92, a gateway forms the entrance to the former orphanage that's
now the Amsterdam Historical Museum (Mon-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat & Sun 1-5pm;
¬6.10; www.ahm.nl ), where artefacts, paintings and documents survey the
city's development from the thirteenth century. Directly outside, the
glassed-in Civic Guard Gallery draws passers-by with free glimpses of
the large company portraits. Just around the corner, off Sint
Luciensteeg, the Begijnhof is a small court of seventeenth-century
buildings; the poor and elderly led a religious life here, celebrating
Mass in their own, concealed, Catholic Church. The plain and unadorned
English Reformed Church, which takes up one side of the Begijnhof, has
pulpit panels designed by the young Piet Mondriaan. Close by, the Spui (pronounced
spow ) is a lively corner of town whose mixture of bookshops and packed
bars centres around a cloying statue of a young boy known as 't
Lieverdje (Little Darling). In the opposite direction, Kalverstraat
comes to an end at Muntplein and the Munttoren - originally a mint and
part of the city walls, topped with a spire by Hendrik de Keyser in
1620. Across the Singel canal is the fragrant daily Flower Market ,
while in the other direction Reguliersbreestraat turns left towards the
loud restaurants of Rembrandtplein . To the south is Reguliersgracht, an
appealing canal with seven distinctive steep bridges stretching in a
perspectival line from Thorbeckeplein.
• Beyond the Randstad
Outside the Randstad towns, the Netherlands is relatively unknown
territory to visitors. In the north, the island of Texel has the
country's most complete beach experience, with plenty of birdlife and
the world's biggest catamaran races. In the northeast, the main draw is
Groningen , a lively, cosmopolitan town with a buzzing streetlife -
especially after dark - and a stunning museum and art gallery. To the
south, the countryside grows steadily more rolling as you head towards
Germany. The town of Arnhem is famous for its bridge, a key objective in
the failed Allied attack of 1944; it also boasts one of the country's
best modern art museums and is a good base for the nearby Hoge Veluwe
National Park . Further south, in the provinces of North Brabant and
Limburg, the landscape slowly fills out, rolling into a rougher
countryside of farmland and forests and eventually into the hills around
Maastricht , a city whose vibrant, pan-European air, is a world away
from the clogs and canals of the north. The southwest, near the Belgian
border across from Bruges and Antwerp, is a land apart, with the Delta
Expo near Middelburg dramatically highlighting the country's long-standing
tussle with the sea for supremacy.
• Randstad towns
The string of towns known as the Randstad , or "rim town", situated amid
a typically Dutch landscape of flat fields cut by canals, form the
country's most populated region and recall the seventeenth-century
heyday of the provinces of North and South Holland, of which they are
now a part. Much of the area is easily visited by means of day-trips
from Amsterdam, but it's more rewarding - and not difficult - to make a
proper tour. Haarlem is definitely worth an overnight stop, while to the
south, the university centre of Leiden makes a pleasant detour before
you reach the refined tranquillity of The Hague and the seedy lowlife of
Rotterdam . Nearby Delft and Gouda repay visits too, the former with one
of the best-preserved centres in the region.
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