Nieuwe Kerk

What it is

De Nieuwe Kerk stands on the west side of Dam Square, wall to wall with the Royal Palace, and it is no longer a working parish church. The building was approved by the bishop in 1408, consecrated in 1409 and dedicated to St Catherine; it is called the New Church only to separate it from the thirteenth-century Oude Kerk on the other side of what was then the Amstel. The Protestant Church could no longer afford to keep it, and in 1979 a national foundation, Nationale Stichting De Nieuwe Kerk, took it on as a venue for exhibitions, national gatherings and cultural events. That is what a visitor buys a ticket for today. The church runs two or three large exhibitions at a time about art, photography, people and cultures, and the ticket admits the holder to whatever is on rather than to the church as a monument in its own right. Alongside that it keeps a state function inherited from its position beside the palace: every Dutch head of state since Willem I in 1814 has been invested here, standing before the brass choir screen, and the 4 May Remembrance Day service is held in the nave. Expect, in short, a medieval church interior with a contemporary exhibition installed inside it.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What's inside

Three fires damaged the church, the worst of them in the winter of 1645, when the roof burned and the building was left a ruin. Almost everything a visitor now stops in front of dates from the rebuilding that followed. The pulpit is the centrepiece, carved over some fifteen years; the brass choir screen behind it is the object the kings and queens stood at to swear allegiance. The main organ is the largest historic organ in the Netherlands, and there is a second, smaller organ in the transept, both kept in playing condition by a monthly recital series. The floor and the walls carry funerary monuments, the best known being the tomb of Admiral Michiel de Ruyter. One of the large windows is the Commemoration Window, designed by Toon Verhoef in 1995 for the liberation of 1945. The structure itself runs to 141 pillars, eight of which were given new foundations in the mid-2020s. The exhibitions are built into this, using the nave, the aisles and the side chapels, so the layout changes from show to show: the World Press Photo edition on view from 24 April to 27 September 2026 puts its Photo of the Year at the crossing and its history timeline in one of the chapels.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

How long to spend

Allow ninety minutes. De Nieuwe Kerk publishes no suggested visit length of its own, on the plan-your-visit page or on the exhibition pages, so that figure is this guide's judgement rather than a recorded fact. It is built on what is actually here: one exhibition of gallery size installed in a single hall, plus a church interior that can be walked in a circuit without stairs. An hour covers the exhibition at a reading pace and leaves nothing for the pulpit, the choir screen or the organ. Two hours is right for a photography show with long captions, which World Press Photo is, or for anyone using the free Bloomberg Connects digital guide, whose building tour runs alongside the exhibition audio. Half an hour is enough only to look at the church and leave, and at twenty-five euros that is a poor use of the ticket. The hard constraint is the door rather than the room: last entry is 16:30 and the church closes at 17:00, so arriving at 16:20 buys forty minutes, not ninety. Anyone with one afternoon on Dam Square should be inside by 15:15 at the latest.

Checked 2026-08-26

Season and crowds

The church is open every day of the week from 10:00 to 17:00, with last entry at 16:30. There is no weekly closing day and no midday break, which makes it one of the easier fixtures to place in an Amsterdam itinerary. What it has instead is a short list of fixed annual closures: 27 April, 3 to 5 May, 28 May, 8 July, 25 December and 1 January. Those dates are the state and commemorative calendar rather than holidays, and a visitor who turns up on King's Day or over the Remembrance and Liberation period will find the doors shut. The first hour after opening is the quietest; Dam Square itself fills up through the middle of the day and the queue at the box office follows it. Two operator pages disagree on how busy the place is over a year — the home page gives an average of 250,000 visitors a year, the About page gives 150,000 — so treat the annual figure as unsettled and judge the day by the square. During the World Press Photo run a free guided tour led by a World Press Photo staff member goes at 15:00 on Wednesdays; monthly organ recitals fall on Tuesdays.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Tickets

The standard adult ticket is €25. Youth aged 12 to 17 pay €15, as do CJP and student cardholders and Uitpas holders. Children up to 11 go free, and so do holders of the Museum Pass, the VriendenLoterij VIP-KAART, the I amsterdam City Card, Go City, the Stadspas, an ICOM card, and members of De Nieuwe Kerk. A second, cheaper tariff applies to the Queer Amsterdam, the Pink City exhibition: €20 adult, €13.50 for youth and for CJP and student holders, €12 on the Uitpas, with the same free categories. The two exhibition pages and the plan-your-visit page do not agree on that show's start date — the home page lists it from 9 July 2026, the ticket table from 28 September — so check the exhibition page for what a given ticket admits to before buying. Tickets can be bought online in advance or at the box office inside the church, and an online ticket does not need printing; it is scanned from a phone. The church is cashless and takes debit and credit cards only. An entry ticket admits during regular opening hours, and De Nieuwe Kerk is not obliged to refund an unused one. Organ recitals are priced separately: €12.50 adult, €7.50 concession.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Getting there

No car is needed, and driving here is the worst of the options. De Nieuwe Kerk is on Dam Square, a ten-minute walk from Amsterdam Centraal straight down the Damrak, which is also the simplest way to arrive. Nearly every tram running to and from Centraal stops at Dam Square: lines 2, 4, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17 and 24. Metro line 52 stops at Rokin, four to five minutes on foot. The operator points visitors at gvb.nl, ns.nl and 9292ov.nl for timetables. For anyone who does drive, three public car parks sit close by — under De Bijenkorf, at Centraal Station and at Nieuwezijds Kolk — but central Amsterdam parking is expensive and the walk from a park-and-ride outside the ring is often faster than the last kilometre by car. The address for a navigation app is Dam, 1012 NP Amsterdam. The entrance is on the square, beside the Royal Palace. All galleries and facilities are accessible to wheelchair users; the toilets are on the lower level of 't Nieuwe Kafé and are reached by lift. The café has its own door onto Dam Square as well as one from inside the church.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What to watch out for

The bag rule is the one that catches people. Bags and suitcases larger than A4 may not be carried into the church; larger handbags, backpacks and umbrellas go in the cloakroom or lockers, and real luggage has to be left at Lockerpoint nearby, which is a separate business a short walk away. Arriving off a train with a case means a detour before the ticket, not after it. The church is cashless: cards only, at the box office and in the shop. Eating and drinking are confined to 't Nieuwe Kafé, and food or drink bottles may not be taken into the exhibition areas — the café also closes for renovation between 18 January and 1 March. Nothing may be touched, and the pulpit and the choir screen are named explicitly in the house rules. Children under 12 must be accompanied by an adult, and the operator recommends a minimum age of 16 for an unaccompanied visit. Two smaller traps: the terms allow partial closure of the building while an exhibition is being installed or taken down, with no right to a refund, so a changeover week can mean less to see than the ticket price suggests; and the nave is a stone church, several degrees cooler than the square outside in any season.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Photography

Hand-held photography is allowed. What the house rules forbid is equipment: no lamps, no drones, no flash, no tripods and no selfie sticks, unless written permission has been given in advance by De Nieuwe Kerk. Drawing or painting inside also needs prior permission for the materials. In practice that means a phone or a camera used quietly is fine and anything that needs setting up is not, which suits the building poorly and the exhibitions well. The interior is dark. Light comes from the tall clear windows down the sides, and on a bright day it falls in hard bands across the nave while the vaults above stay black; a hand-held frame of the pulpit or the choir screen wants a high ISO and a steady grip on a pillar rather than a tripod that will be stopped. Late morning gives the most even light through the south side. Note also that photography inside an exhibition may be restricted by that show's own lenders — check the signs at the entrance to the galleries. For the exterior, the church reads best from the north-east corner of Dam Square, where the spire clears the roofline of the Royal Palace; the public roof platform that allowed close views of the spire was a temporary feature of the 2025 restoration and has been dismantled.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Where it is

Nearby

External links

• View on Wikidata