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City guide · Netherlands
More than 100 km of canal runs through Amsterdam, and the three that shape a visit — Herengracht, Keizersgracht, Prinsengracht — were dug in the seventeenth century as concentric half-circles around the medieval core. That belt, the Grachtengordel, went onto the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2010, and it is why the city reads as a set of rings rather than as a grid. The municipality covers 219.32 km² and held 946,447 people in May 2026, with 1,496,215 in the urban area. The museums are not inside the rings: Museumplein and the Vondelpark lie beyond them, as do Jordaan and de Pijp, which is usually where a second day goes.
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The Grachtengordel is not a building a visitor enters but a district a visitor walks through, and it is the largest single thing on Amsterdam's sightseeing list.
The Rijksmuseum is the national museum of the Netherlands, at Museumstraat 1 on the south side of Amsterdam's Museumplein, immediately next to the Van Gogh Museum.
The Van Gogh Museum stands at Museumplein 6, on the square it shares with the Rijksmuseum and the Stedelijk, and its main entrance faces that square.
The Anne Frank House is the canal house at Prinsengracht 263-267 in central Amsterdam where Anne Frank and seven other people hid from July 1942 until their arrest, and where she wrote the diary.
The Royal Palace Amsterdam stands on the west side of Dam Square, opposite the National Monument and beside the Nieuwe Kerk. It was not built as a palace.
The Oude Kerk is the oldest building in Amsterdam and, since 2012, a museum of contemporary art that happens to be a medieval parish church.
Museum Het Rembrandthuis is the house on Jodenbreestraat that Rembrandt van Rijn bought on 5 January 1639 for thirteen thousand guilders and lived in until his bankruptcy forced its auction in 1658, when it fetched eleven thousand.
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 Portuguese Synagogue stands on Mr. Visserplein in central Amsterdam and is known to the community that built it as the Esnoga, the Judaeo-Spanish word for synagogue.
Source: OpenStreetMap contributors, Wikidata ·
Set your days, your pace and the hours you actually want to be out. The planner works around closing days and travel time, and leaves room to eat.
