Amsterdam (Rough Guide) - Martin Dunford [20]
Travellers with a pre-existing medical condition are sometimes excluded from insurance policies; read the small print carefully. Ask your doctor for a medical certificate of your fitness to travel as some insurance companies insist on it.
Explore Amsterdam
The Old Centre
The Grachtengordel
The Jordaan and Western docklands
The Old Jewish Quarter and Eastern docklands
The Museum Quarter and the Vondelpark
The outer districts
Day-trips from the city
The Old Centre
Amsterdam’s most vivacious and arguably most touristy district, the Old Centre is an oval-shaped tangle of narrow streets and picturesque canals, confined in the north by the River IJ and to the west and south by the Singel, the first of several canals that once girdled the entire city. Given the dominance of Centraal Station on most transport routes, this is almost certainly where you’ll arrive. Immediately outside, Stationsplein is home to the main tourist and transport information offices, a busy maelstrom of buskers and bicycles, trams and tourists – and, for the past few years, construction works, as slow progress on the city’s new metro line continues. From here, a stroll across the bridge will take you onto the Damrak, which once divided the Oude Zijde (Old Side) of the medieval city to the east from the smaller Nieuwe Zijde (New Side) to the west. It also led – and leads – to the heart of the Old Centre, Dam Square, which is overseen by two of the city’s most impressive buildings, the Koninklijk Paleis (Royal Palace) and the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church). Rokin runs south from Dam Square, parallel to pedestrianized Kalverstraat, which is the city’s prime mainstream shopping street. Sights-wise, the main targets in this area are the secluded Begijnhof, a circle of dignified old houses originally built for a semi-religious community in the 1340s, and the museum of city history, the Amsterdams Historisch Museum.
Nowadays, much of the Oude Zijde is taken up by the city’s notorious Red Light District, which stretches across Warmoesstraat and the two canals – Oudezijds Voorburgwal and Oudezijds Achterburgwal – that formed the heart of medieval Amsterdam. There’s a prevailing seediness in the Red Light District that inevitably dulls its many charms, but there are still one or two signs that you are in the city’s most historic quarter: the delightful Amstelkring, a clandestine Catholic church dating from the seventeenth century, and the charming Gothic architecture of the Oude Kerk, not to mention the relatively unpretentious beauty of the canals themselves (if you can block out the prevailing neon). The sleazy atmosphere decreases the further east you go towards Nieuwmarkt, a large and unassuming square where Kloveniersburgwal begins, a large and stately canal that effectively marks the border of the Red Light District. Further east, another canal, Groenburgwal, is one of the most beguiling parts of the Old Centre, with a medley of handsome old houses lining what is one of its prettiest stretches of water.
The Old Centre |
Old times, new times
Amsterdam’s Old Centre follows the core of the original city, its narrow streets and canals confined to the north by the River IJ and the harbour, and to the west and south by the Singel, which used to form the boundary of the old port. Amsterdam started out as a humble fishing village here, at the marshy mouth of the River Amstel, before the local lord gave it some significance by building