Metravel city quest
City Amsterdam: free walking route “quest: a city on piles” along the sights. 10 points. Approximately 2 h 30 min. Quests and legends - straight from your
Amsterdam has no solid ground. None at all. Beneath the paving you will walk over today are peat, silt and water, and not a single house here stands ‘on the ground’: each rests on wooden piles driven through the marsh into firm sand. Millions of trunks, entire upside-down forests, support a whole city. There is even an old Dutch joke that Amsterdam is a forest growing with its treetops downwards.
It all began with a dam. In the 13th century, fishermen dammed the mouth of the Amstel River, and the settlement beside it was named accordingly: ‘dam on the Amstel’, Amstelledamme. On 27 October 1275, Count Floris V of Holland exempted its residents from road tolls. That charter became the first written mention of the city, the starting point of Amsterdam's history.
Ever since, city and water have lived together: water was a road and a defence, an enemy and a provider. Amsterdam did not fight the marsh: it came to terms with it. Today you will see what that looks like: a palace standing on fourteen thousand piles, houses that ‘dance’ because the piles beneath them have grown tired, a floating market, narrow façades whose width was taxed, and a crown on the city's tallest tower.
What to do: 1) Read the story and task at each stop. 2) Find the place on the map and walk to it. 3) Look around and answer the question.
This walking route covers about four kilometres in the city centre. We start where that very dam stood: on Dam Square. Let's go!
The route points in order — what these places are and why they are interesting. Tasks and answers stay inside the quest.
You are standing on a dam. Yes, really: the broad square beneath your feet is the very dam across the Amstel where the city began, the one that gave it its name.
Counted the crosses? That's right: St Andrew's crosses arranged in a column are Amsterdam's coat of arms.
Atlas's copper burden weighs about a thousand kilograms. Now imagine how the piles beneath the entire palace must feel.
Return from the quiet of the Begijnhof to the city: leave onto Spui and walk south to the Singel canal. In a few minutes, pavilions will stretch along the water, smelling of spring whatever the season.
The flower market leads straight to it: on Muntplein, where the Singel meets the Amstel, stands an elegant tower with an openwork spire, the Munttoren, or Mint Tower. It was once part of the Regulierspoort, a gate in the medieval city wall built in the 1480s.
From Muntplein, head northeast into the old quarter: along Rokin, through the cosy university corner by Grimburgwal, to the Kloveniersburgwal canal and little Oude Hoogstraat. You are walking through the city's oldest part, where every metre of land, or rather marsh, was worth its weight in gold for centuries.
Now for the city's best-known ‘group portrait’. Walk north to Damrak's broad water: this is the former mouth of the Amstel, the old harbour where ships once sailed straight into the city's heart.
An optional stop if you want to see the city on piles from its original side, the water. A little further along Damrak, near Central Station, are the sightseeing boat jetties, the starting point for classic hour-long canal cruises.
About that detail beneath the roof ridge: it is a hook, or more precisely a hoisting beam with a hook, a hijsbalk. Staircases in narrow houses are so steep and cramped that neither a wardrobe nor a piano can go up them, so for centuries furniture and goods were hauled through the windows on ropes.
Got the colour? It has its own drama: in 1906, for some reason, the Westertoren's crown was repainted yellow-gold.
This route is part of Metravel city quests. Below are the other quests in this city and cities with quests nearby.