Amsterdam Canal Parade 2022: A Walking Tour

Amsterdam Pride is the only Pride parade in the world held entirely on water, and this walk catches it near where the boats first gather, before the main run down the Prinsengracht. It starts in Wertheimpark, a quiet green square in the Plantage district that spends most of the year as an ordinary neighbourhood park and one Saturday in August as a staging ground for a parade that draws half a million spectators to the canal banks.

Since 1995, the Canal Parade has been the centrepiece of Pride Amsterdam week, running some eighty decorated boats — chartered by community organisations, embassies, and local businesses — along a route that starts near the Scheepvaartmuseum, follows the Amstel, and continues onto the Prinsengracht before finishing near Westerdok. This footage, filmed in August 2022, sits at the eastern end of that route, where Nieuwe Herengracht carries the first boats past crowds who arrived early enough to claim a spot on the water's edge.

From Wertheimpark the walk follows the canal to Nieuwe Herengracht itself, where the parade is already visible — flags, music, and boats moving slowly enough that spectators can read every banner twice. Overhead, the kind of loose summer cloud cover Amsterdam gets more often than it gets clear skies drifts past without doing much to cool anything down, and the crowd along the water does not seem to mind either way.

The last stretch of the walk is really just standing still and watching everyone else stand still — the crowds gathered three and four deep along Nieuwe Herengracht, phones raised, waiting for the next boat to round the bend. It is less a single landmark than a snapshot of an afternoon the whole city turns out for.

This is what TravelHubCam is here to show you: not the parade's famous stretch down the Prinsengracht, but the quieter edge of it — the park where it starts, the canal where the first boats pass, and the crowd gathered in between.