Discover Amsterdam

Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands and its largest city, built on drained peat bog at the point where the Amstel met a tidal inlet of the North Sea. Almost none of the ground it stands on is natural, and almost nothing about its shape is accidental.

The centre is a plan rather than a growth. From 1613 the city was extended in three concentric arcs of canal -- Herengracht, Keizersgracht, Prinsengracht -- with a fourth, the Singelgracht, thrown round the outside for defence and water management, and the spoil used to raise the building plots behind them. The result is a seventeenth-century development scheme that people still live in, and it was inscribed by UNESCO in 2010 on exactly that basis. There are more than a hundred kilometres of canal, around ninety islands and some 1,500 bridges.

What the plan produced is a city of narrow, tall, brick houses on timber piles, turned to face the water. The narrowness is a tax response and the height is what you do when you cannot build outward; the hoisting beams under the gables are there because the staircases were never going to take furniture. Reading the fronts is most of what there is to do here.

The museums are the other half. The Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk sit together on one square at the edge of the canal district, which is a concentration no other European city quite matches, and the Anne Frank House is a preserved hiding place in the Jordaan rather than a museum built to look like one.

It is also a working capital of just under a million people that receives many times that number of visitors, and the tension between those two facts is the city's dominant local argument -- over short lets, over crowding in the centre, over what the canal belt is for.

How many days does Amsterdam need? Two full days covers the canal belt and the Museumplein without hurrying. A third is what lets you cross the IJ, get out to Waterland, or give the Rijksmuseum the half-day it deserves rather than the ninety minutes most people give it.

Do I need to book the Anne Frank House and the Van Gogh Museum in advance? Yes, and specifically online with a timed slot -- these are the two places where turning up on the day routinely fails. Treat them as fixed points and build the rest of the day around them.

Is it the capital if the government is in The Hague? Yes -- Amsterdam is the constitutional capital, while the government, the parliament and the royal working residence are all in The Hague. It is an arrangement that confuses visitors and nobody Dutch.

Should I hire a bicycle? Only if you are going beyond the canal belt. Inside it the distances are walkable, the lanes are genuinely fast, and a bike you have to lock and retrieve is more trouble than it saves. For the ring outside the centre, or for Waterland across the ferry, it is the right tool.

Why are the houses so narrow and why do they lean? Narrow because the plots were taxed on their frontage and tall because the city could not spread. They lean because they stand on timber piles driven into sand beneath the peat: the piles last while they stay submerged and rot if the water table drops, which is why the city holds each district at a fixed water level. The hoisting beams under the gables are there because nothing large was ever getting up those stairs.