The oldest neighborhood of Amsterdam, to the east of Dam Square, dates back to the medieval 13th century. But at the same time, it's a lively modern place with an active nightlife, busy plazas, tranquil gardens and the most popular shopping street in the city.
For more information about Amsterdam, see the Official Tourist Information website.
We'll start at Spui, then spend time at Rembrandtplein, a great place to take your pictures, and travel along some busy streets, join the bicycle crowd, trying not to get run over. This brings us to the Nieuwmarkt for more restaurants and bars.
We will end up at the Red Light district, always a popular and busy place, especially at night, with many things to see in addition to those bordello windows. But group tours are not allowed, so you'll be on your own.
Let's begin a few blocks south of Dam Square at the neighborhood around Spui. Even though Spui is close to the center, it's far enough away that the typical day tourist doesn’t even get here. So it's a lot more peaceful than Dam Square. It is just a great place to hang out, day or night.
Cafes are a major attraction of Spui with their outdoor tables on the terrace, enclosed with awnings for some shelter. Their tall round tables can attract a crowd in the evening, especially inviting for a bunch of people standing around talking to each other. Preferred beverage is beer, but not just Heineken.
Spui’s classic bookstore is one of the delightful amenities of the area, and there's a weekly book market in the square on Fridays, and there's also a weekly Sunday art market here.
Five different tramlines pass near the Spui and the Rokin metro station is just 200 meters from here. Or you could easily walk, for example, from Dam Square, which is only a half kilometer away.
It's lovely in the daytime, but even better at night, with restaurants like the Five Fleas, since 1870, it's still a great place to eat and the building dates back to 1627. Spuistraat extends out from the plaza with many more restaurants along its length. This is another wonderful place to explore, especially in the evening when it's all come to life.
Cafe Hoppe has been serving gin for 348 years, probably to Rembrandt too, still popular with locals today. If you are here in the evening, have a beer or go local with gin, then find one of the restaurants along the way and settle in for an excellent dinner.
From the spelling, Spui looks like you might say "spooey” but is pronounced something like “Spow.” The name could be translated as "spew" as in discharging water, because that's what happened here in the old days when this area was a body of water. But then the adjacent Singel canal was dug in the 1420s, and this area was then drained and became the square that we know today.
Those little side lanes are always delightful in Amsterdam, so you want to get off the main drag as much as possible and do some meandering. Along these side streets you'll find shops, restaurants and beautiful old buildings.
There is another wonderful attraction right next to Spui. It's an old housing courtyard with a garden in the middle, the amazing Begijnhof, a retirement home for ladies that dates back to the 14th century. This is an island of tranquility in the midst of the busy city.
This type of housing has been a tradition for a long time in the Netherlands, sponsored either by the church or wealthy benefactors or the government. It provides a secure old folks housing system, like an almshouse designed to take care of the poor. About 100 ladies live in this housing complex, which is open to the public during the day. Visitors are requested to be quiet in respect for the privacy and peace of the residents.
Origins date back to the 14th century, but most of those Gothic facades were replaced in the 17th and 18th centuries, with renovations done in the 1970s to improve the living conditions.
The English Reformed Church in the middle is one of the oldest buildings in Amsterdam, home to an English-speaking congregation, and also it provides a platform for performance of chamber music with 70 annual concerts.
Just next door you could enter the Amsterdam Museum displaying the history of the city that we will visit in a separate page, with its lovely courtyard cafe freely open to the public.
Quiet side streets lead off from Kalverstraat, the main pedestrian avenue of the city and busiest shopping street in the entire country. Every tourist will eventually spend quite a bit of time walking along this shopping promenade, mostly filled with chain stores, not much in the way of independent small shops here, and you won’t find very many locals walking along this street, especially during the daytime.
It is the major tourist magnet of the city, a great place for people-watching. This lane is the pedestrian superhighway of the city, no cars allowed, only people, extending from the train station through Dam Square, changing names and going all the way down to the neighborhood we've just been exploring, and then continues to Rembrandtplein. That's an easy 500-meter walk along the south end of Kalverstraat.
Rembrandtplein is named after that famous artist, who owned a house nearby in the 1640s, represented in the cast iron statue made in 1852, Amsterdam's oldest surviving statue in a public space. This plaza is one of the most popular gathering places in town for locals and visitors. It's nicely enclosed by those historic buildings, many dating to the 17th century, with hotels, restaurants, shops, bars and cafes.
This is a most enjoyable place to hang out and to spend a little time, maybe sit at the café and enjoy the fountains. You can sit down on a bench, relax, do some people-watching, take some pictures, just watch the buzz of activity all around you here, with that green awning of trees up above. It is really the ideal urban park.
In the Middle Ages this was a fortified gateway in the defensive wall that went around the city, which might explain these statues of soldiers. But there's something else about these statues that looks familiar, doesn't it?
Oh! These are bronze sculptures are based on Rembrandt's most famous painting, The Night Watch. This was a favorite place to take pictures, and I say was because, well, they're no longer there.
Unfortunately, they've been removed by the artists, two Russians who wanted 1.5 million euro for them and couldn't make a deal, so they removed them. Sorry, gone. But at least you saw the picture. Today it is clean and empty, but even without those statues, Rembrandtplein is still a lovely place to visit, with attractive streets nearby that are fun to explore.
We are heading north a few blocks through Waterlooplein to Nieuwmarkt and we will end up at the Red Light District.
Waterlooplein is the oldest flea market in the country, and they're open from Monday through Saturday until about 5:30 in the afternoon. Unfortunately, by the time I got there, they were already shutting down for the day.
Just beyond it, you'll get to the busy street of Jodenbreestraat. Many bicycles going by and other miscellaneous wheeled vehicles. I saw a dog in a stroller carriage, and a car towing a grand piano with pianist on a trailer, the only mobile popup piano concert I've ever seen. These streets can be endlessly entertaining.
An attraction of this street is the house Rembrandt lived in, now the Rembrandt House Museum, which we will describe in our other page about the museums of Amsterdam.
Even if the traffic is only bicycles going by, you've got to be careful and watch out for the peddlers, some of them holding their phone with two hands and not watching where they're going.
Oude Hoogstraat is one of the main crosstown streets of town connecting the Dam, extending from Damstraat over to the east side and going over a couple of scenic canals.
These little excursions to slightly out-of-the-way places are yet another reason why it's a great idea to spend at least three or four days when you're visiting Amsterdam.
We have arrived at the Waag in the heart of Nieuwmarkt Square. This building, looking something like a fortress, had been one of the gates in the defensive city wall. Now it's a very nice restaurant with indoor and outdoor seating. The Waag was a public building where various goods were weighed, then it became a headquarters for several guilds, including blacksmiths, painters and masons.
All around Nieuwmarkt Square you'll find lots of restaurants with a wide variety of cuisine. There are over 20 cafes and coffee shops facing the square including some Chinese, because there is a small Chinatown nearby.
They have a daily market on the square, an organic food market on Saturdays, and a market for antiques and books on Sundays in the summer. This square has been a marketplace ever since 1614 when the canals around it were filled in.
In the 1970s many of the buildings around the square were torn down to make room for a new highway, which led to heavy rioting known as the Nieuwmarkt Riots. The highway project was abandoned, but they did build the metro, so there's now an underground station here.
We have now reached the Red Light District, one of the most beautiful parts of town. Let's start with a prayer at Amsterdam's oldest building, the Oude Kerk (Old Church) dating from the year 1300.
During the last seven centuries, there have been many renovations and expansions of the church, with the original roof well-preserved as the largest medieval wooden vault in Europe. The building still stands majestically and used today as an art center. There are many great old buildings to admire in the Red Light District.
This notorious zone is one of the most popular places in town for the tourists to visit. Despite the tradition of prostitution and drugs, it's a safe place to visit, but ironically, the most problems are caused by staggering drunks and noisy tourists rather than hardcore criminals or junkies.
The neighborhood has gotten more peaceful in recent years due to stricter law enforcement, and guided tour groups are no longer permitted. This is one of the most beautiful parts of town, but during the daytime, you don't see red lights, so this neighborhood has quite a different character then.
If you come here during the daytime and walk along some of the canals just next to the Red Light District, it's a quiet throwback to Old Amsterdam at its best. There are a few shops and cafes along Oudezijds Voorburgwal, but mostly it's a residential place, so the buildings you see are primarily homes.
At the north end of the district it gets very busy with porn shops and restaurants, especially along Zeedijk, one of the oldest streets in town. It does get a little crowded here, so you want to be careful and look out for pickpockets and scammers and hustlers, but you'll be fine. There are quite a few police in the neighborhood keeping their eyes on what's going on, so just enjoy yourself.
They even have a Chinese Buddhist temple, He Hua Temple, dedicated to creating a pure land here on Earth, to purify the heart and soul and give people the opportunity to practice Buddhism.
These crowds can get pretty sloppy and leave a big mess at the end of the night, but fortunately, Amsterdam cleans up every morning and makes it brand new again. It's pretty wonderful to watch the skilled sanitation crew using their high technology, a truck with the water pressure and an old-fashioned hose and the boot here and there to clean things up.
This same cleansing process is happening all over the city to make it fresh for the new day. It's a big challenge to clean up all this garbage that careless people leave behind. But somehow these guys do it, and they get a lot of help from shop owners who take care of their own business, making a fresh, clean city for us to enjoy every day.
We have many more pages about Amsterdam, one of the world's greatest cities. Take a carriage ride or hop on a tram, we will walk the little backstreets, get on a boat, do some shopping, people-watching, eating, drinking, admire the historic architecture and visit the most important art museum.
I spent three weeks traveling through this wonderful country, shooting lots of video and created a couple dozen travel movies that you can find in my collection, exploring some of the greatest towns that you could ever visit.
