Amsterdam Walk Tour Summer 2021

This walk crosses Amsterdam the way most residents actually do it — by ferry — starting at the Eye Filmmuseum on the IJ's north bank, a glass-and-steel building by the Vienna firm Delugan Meissl that opened in 2012 and has become Amsterdam Noord's most photographed silhouette. From there, the free GVB ferry carries pedestrians across the water to Centraal Station in a few minutes, a crossing that has cost nothing for as long as the city has run it.

On the south bank, the walk enters the city properly at Amsterdam Centraal before turning onto Damrak, past the Victoria Hotel — opened in 1890, the first hotel in the Netherlands to have electric lighting, and still standing on the same corner it was built on more than a century before phones existed to photograph it. Damrak itself runs straight from the station toward Dam Square, lined with the mix of souvenir shops and old facades that has made it one of the most-walked streets in the country.

The route then turns off the main tourist line onto Oudezijds Voorburgwal, a canal whose origins go back to the 1380s, when it began as part of the moat and rampart system built to protect medieval Amsterdam. Six centuries later it is lined with more than a hundred individually listed national monuments — Golden Age merchant houses that once had private canal gardens behind them, now sitting a few streets from the Red Light District at the edge of De Wallen.

The walk ends at Dam Square, the city's historic centre and the site of the dam that gave Amsterdam its name, before finishing on Rokin, the wide street that was itself a canal until it was filled in during the early 20th century.

This is what TravelHubCam is here to show you: not the touristic Damrak alone, but the whole crossing — the ferry, the station, the hotel, the six-hundred-year-old canal, and the square at the end of it.