50 Fun Facts About Amsterdam

Amsterdam is the Dutch capital, but the government and parliament sit in which city?

The arrangement is written into the constitution. Even in the Dutch Republic, Amsterdam was neither the capital nor the seat of government while being by far the richest city.

Why do many old Amsterdam canal houses have a beam and hook jutting out from the top of the gable?

To hoist goods upstairs: the houses are narrow with very steep stairs, so merchants winched stock up to attic stores from outside, and the pulleys still come in handy for furniture.

Amsterdam sits in which Dutch province?

North Holland: the national capital is not even the capital of its own province, which is governed from Haarlem. The province dates from 1840, when Holland was split into north and south.

Amsterdam's Golden Age boom took off after Spanish troops captured which rival port in 1585?

Antwerp: it had been the dominant port of the Low Countries, and when it fell its Protestant merchants fled north while the Dutch blockaded its river, handing Amsterdam the trade.

Founded in 1602, what Amsterdam institution is considered the world's oldest 'modern' one of its kind?

Its stock exchange: it grew out of dealing in the shares of a single spice-trading company, and it is still running four centuries later as Euronext Amsterdam.

Which trading company, run from Amsterdam, is often called the world's first multinational corporation?

The Dutch East India Company, or VOC, behaved almost like a state: its charter let it sign treaties, build forts and keep its own army in Asia.

Many old cargo ships moored along Amsterdam's canals now serve as what?

Houseboats began as cheap housing, often old cargo vessels converted when homes were scarce. With moorings now limited, living on one has become expensive.

What does the name of Amsterdam's Keizersgracht mean in English?

Emperor's Canal honours Maximilian I, who let Amsterdam top its coat of arms with his crown in thanks for the city's loans. The crown from the arms also caps the Westerkerk tower.

What nickname does Amsterdam share with several other canal cities?

Venice of the North is also claimed by Stockholm, Bruges and St Petersburg. Amsterdam's canal ring was no accident of geography: it was dug to a single plan that drained swampland to extend the city.

Amsterdam's water authority fishes about 12,000 to 15,000 of what out of the canals every year?

Bicycles are the main catch of the water authority's dredging crews. They blame theft and vandalism, reasoning that owners rarely throw their own bikes in.

The 1960s counterculture group Provo proposed which famous scheme for Amsterdam?

A free White Bicycle plan left white-painted bikes unlocked around Amsterdam for anyone to ride, but police quickly removed them. The idea went on to inspire bike-share schemes around the world.

Which artist, most associated with Amsterdam, was buried in the Westerkerk in 1669?

Rembrandt was buried in the Westerkerk, but no one now knows exactly where, so the church honours him with a memorial plaque on its north wall.

The Rijksmuseum's star 1642 group portrait of a civic militia company is commonly known as what?

The Night Watch is not a night scene at all: thick, darkened varnish made the daytime militia portrait look nocturnal, and the mistaken nickname stuck. Its formal title names Captain Frans Banninck Cocq.

Which other Amsterdam landmark did Rijksmuseum architect Pierre Cuypers design in a matching style?

Centraal station opened in 1889 on artificial islands raised in the IJ, so the city's main rail hub stands where open harbour water used to be.

The Stedelijk Museum's smooth white wing, opened in 2012, was quickly nicknamed what?

The Bathtub looks just like one: a smooth white tub raised on legs, with the modern art museum's entrance moved underneath it.

Which painter's works stayed in his brother's family for decades before becoming the core of an Amsterdam museum in 1973?

Vincent van Gogh's works passed to his brother Theo's family, and in 1962 his nephew handed them to a foundation with the Dutch state's help. The museum built for them opened in 1973.

The Anne Frank House museum preserves the Secret Annex at number 263 of which canal?

Prinsengracht 263 was nearly demolished in the 1950s to make way for a factory, until a campaign by Amsterdam citizens saved it. It opened as a museum in 1960.

Of the eight people who hid in the Secret Annex, who was the only one to survive the camps?

Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam, where helper Miep Gies handed him the papers she had saved from the annex. He published them as Anne's diary in 1947.

Who gave Amsterdam its motto, 'Heroic, Determined, Merciful', to honour its conduct under German occupation?

Queen Wilhelmina's motto honours Amsterdammers' conduct in the war. In the February Strike of 1941 they walked out in protest at the persecution of the city's Jews.

The three X-shaped crosses on Amsterdam's flag and coat of arms are which saint's crosses?

St Andrew's crosses probably came from the shield of the Persijn family, knights who once held land around Amsterdam. They are no nod to the city's patron saint, who is St Nicholas.

Which Dam Square landmark was built in the 1650s as Amsterdam's city hall?

The Royal Palace served as the city hall for 150 years, until Louis Bonaparte, made king of Holland by his brother Napoleon, took it as his residence in 1808.

Het Houten Huys, one of central Amsterdam's last two wooden-fronted houses, stands in which enclosed courtyard?

The Begijnhof was built for the beguines, Catholic women who lived like nuns but took no monastic vows, so any of them was free to leave and marry.

A popular theory traces the name of Amsterdam's Jordaan district to which French word?

Jardin (garden) suits a district whose streets are named after trees and flowers, but Dutch place-name dictionaries prefer another story: a joking biblical nickname, the Jordan, for the canal at its edge.

The Amsterdam park opened in 1865 as the 'New Park' was soon renamed after which Dutch writer?

Joost van den Vondel, the poet and playwright, got a bronze statue in the park in 1867, two years after it opened, and the New Park took its new name from the statue.

What did three straight European Cup wins from 1971 to 1973 earn Amsterdam's Ajax?

The trophy to keep: a rule gave the original to any club winning three years running or five times in all, so a new cup had to be made. Ajax's fourth title came in 1995.

Amsterdam's stadium, opened in 1996 as the Amsterdam ArenA, was renamed in 2018 after whom?

Johan Cruyff grew up minutes from his boyhood club's old ground, where his widowed mother worked as a cleaner. The arena took his name two years after his death in 2016.

Which drinks brand first sponsored the Olympics at the 1928 Amsterdam Games?

Coca-Cola's deal with the 1928 Games is also how the drink reached the Netherlands: the first bottles sold in the country came over for the Olympics.

Which beer brand began when a 22-year-old bought Amsterdam's Haystack brewery in 1864?

Heineken was new in 1864 but its brewery was not: De Hooiberg, the Haystack, had been making beer in Amsterdam since 1592 when Gerard Adriaan Heineken took it over.

Which Amsterdam market has floated on the Singel canal since 1862?

The Bloemenmarkt, billed as the world's only floating flower market, floats because nurseries outside the city once shipped their plants in by water every day and sold them straight from the boats.

Amsterdam's Homomonument, three pink granite triangles unveiled in 1987, remembers whom?

Gays and lesbians persecuted by the Nazis inspired it: the memorial grew out of a 1970 protest in which activists were arrested for trying to lay a wreath for them at the Dam Square war memorial.

The high point of Pride Amsterdam, held since 1996, is a parade of what?

Boats on the canals carry a Pride that began in 1996 as a festival of freedom, not as the protest march most Prides grew from. Hundreds of thousands line the banks.

What portmanteau nickname does Amsterdam's combined city hall and opera house carry?

The Stopera blends 'stadhuis' (city hall) and 'opera'. The combined plan was so contested that riots broke out in 1982 as building work began.

Artis, opened in Amsterdam in 1838 and named from a Latin motto about nature, is the Netherlands' oldest what?

Zoo entry was for members only at first; later anyone could get in for a quarter, but only in September. The last quagga died at Artis in 1883, and nobody realised it was the last of its kind.

Which airline's cargo jet crashed into apartment blocks in Amsterdam's Bijlmermeer district in 1992?

El Al Flight 1862 lost both engines from its right wing minutes after leaving Schiphol. A poplar that survived became 'the tree that saw it all', and no planes fly over during the memorial held there each 4 October.

The Magere Brug over the river is better known in English by what name?

Skinny Bridge most likely describes the 1691 original, so narrow that two people could barely pass. A story told to tourists credits two sisters named Mager, Dutch for skinny, who lived on opposite banks.

The 1637 collapse of the price of which commodity is remembered as the first speculative bubble?

Tulip bulbs with flame-striped petals drew the wildest bids, some priced above an Amsterdam townhouse. The stripes that buyers prized were later found to be the work of a virus.

Which science museum, in a green ship-shaped Renzo Piano building, rises over the IJ tunnel?

NEMO stands right on the mouth of the road tunnel: as the traffic dips under the harbour, the building rises the opposite way. Its sloping roof is a public piazza.

Amsterdam banned smoking what in public around the red-light district from 25 May 2023?

Cannabis smoked on the street there became a fineable offence, alongside earlier closing times for bars and brothels. Weeks earlier the city had launched a 'stay away' ad campaign aimed at young British men.

When the English seized Dutch New Amsterdam in 1664, they renamed it in honour of which royal duke?

The Duke of York, later King James II, had pushed for the seizure himself, and New Amsterdam became New York. Three years later a peace treaty left it English and let the Dutch keep Surinam.

Which 17th-century philosopher, born in Amsterdam to Portuguese-Jewish parents, was expelled from its synagogue?

Baruch Spinoza was 23 when Amsterdam's Portuguese synagogue issued the harshest ban in its history against him in 1656, and it was never lifted. He went on to earn his living grinding lenses.

Before it became a great trading city, Amsterdam is traditionally said to have begun as a village living off what?

Fishing, by the traditional account, fed the villagers who dammed the river around 1270. A toll charter of 1275, the first record of the place, calls them the people living near that dam: the origin of the city's name.

A canal-side bench in Amsterdam became a fan pilgrimage spot after featuring in which 2014 film?

The Fault in Our Stars made the bench so famous that its disappearance weeks after the film opened made world news. A city spokesman called it 'a bit embarrassing'; it was back in place the following week.

One plant in Amsterdam's Hortus Botanicus in the early 1700s is credited as the parent of which crop across Latin America?

Coffee travelled as a gift: by the usual account a young plant from Amsterdam went to Louis XIV of France, and a seedling from the king's tree was later carried to Martinique and multiplied.

Which waterway, opened in 1876, gave Amsterdam's port a short cut to IJmuiden?

The North Sea Canal replaced an older ship canal at least three times as long, which ran all the way up to Den Helder. A new port town grew at its seaward end: IJmuiden, 'mouth of the IJ'.

Opened by the Dutch king in 2022, the 500-metre structure at IJmuiden that lets ships reach Amsterdam's port is a giant what?

Sea lock: at 500 metres long and 70 wide it was billed as the world's largest, built so that bigger cargo and cruise ships could reach Amsterdam. The lock it relieved dated from 1929.

Which Beatle spent his 1969 honeymoon staging a week-long 'bed-in' for peace at the Amsterdam Hilton?

John Lennon and Yoko Ono, newly married in Gibraltar, invited the world's press to their hotel bedside every day for a week. He retold the whole trip in a Beatles single weeks later.

Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, opened in 1888, is renowned above all for what?

Its acoustics are rated alongside Vienna's Musikverein and Boston's Symphony Hall, yet it was built before acoustics was a science: the architect simply modelled it on a celebrated hall in Leipzig.

Amsterdam's traditional 'brown cafés' are said to take their name from walls stained by decades of what?

Tobacco smoke is the usual explanation: it browned the walls and ceilings while smoking was still allowed indoors. With the bars now dwindling, Amsterdam's council voted in 2023 to look into protecting them as heritage.

Amsterdam's bid for the 1992 Summer Olympics won just five votes; which rival city was chosen instead?

Barcelona, home city of IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch, took the 1986 vote, and Amsterdam, the 1928 host, was the first of six bidders knocked out.

The Dam to Dam Run covers 16 km from Amsterdam to which town?

Zaandam was once so poorly linked to the capital that a 1959 stunt race between the two towns' Dams, won by speedboat in about ten minutes, lobbied for a tunnel. The run itself began in 1985.