Amsterdam Walking Tour: Vondelpark, the Great Museums and De Pijp

South of the canal ring, Amsterdam opens up. The streets get wider, the buildings get grander, and the city that grew rich in the Golden Age shows off what it did with the money two centuries later: a great park, a world-famous concert hall and the museums that hold its painters. This walk starts in the middle of Vondelpark, crosses Museumplein past the Concertgebouw, the Van Gogh Museum and the Rijksmuseum, and then trades high culture for street food at the Albert Cuyp Market, finishing in the cafes and green squares of De Pijp. It covers about three kilometers on flat ground, one of the most varied self-guided walking tours you can do in an afternoon.

Before you set off

Plan on about two hours at a stroll, without going inside anything. If you want to visit a museum, add at least two hours for each and book a time slot online in advance, because the Van Gogh Museum in particular sells out. The whole route is flat, on park paths and paved streets, and easy for strollers and wheelchairs. Watch for cyclists everywhere, but especially in Vondelpark, where they share the paths with you, and in the passage under the Rijksmuseum, where they come through at speed. The Albert Cuyp Market runs most days but not Sundays, so check before you go if the market is part of your plan, and come hungry, since lunch from the stalls is half the point. Vondelpark gives you plenty of shade; Museumplein gives you almost none, so bring a hat in summer and a rain layer at any time of year. To reach the start, enter the park from its main gate near Leidseplein and walk about ten minutes along the main path to the ponds in its middle.

Vondelpark

You are in the middle of Vondelpark, among the ponds, lawns and big old trees that make this the city's favorite back garden. It opened in 1865, laid out by a group of well-off citizens who wanted somewhere to walk and ride in the fresh air, and its designers gave it the look of an English landscape: winding paths, irregular ponds, carefully placed clumps of trees, nothing in a straight line. A few years later a statue of Joost van den Vondel, the great seventeenth century poet and playwright, was put up in the park, and the park took his name. It looks effortless, but it is not. The ground here is soft peat, and the park has had to be raised and drained more than once to stop it sinking. Look around and you will see the round white Blue Teahouse, a small modernist cafe from the 1930s, and nearby the open-air theater, which puts on free performances in summer. Somewhere in the greenery stands a large concrete sculpture by Picasso, given to the park for its hundredth birthday. On a sunny day the lawns fill with picnics, birthdays and people who have simply decided not to go back to work. To move on, walk east along the main path to the bridge where Van Baerlestraat crosses over the park, leave the park there and follow that street southeast, away from the park, for about eight minutes.

Concertgebouw

In front of you stands the Concertgebouw, a palace of red brick and pale stone with a golden lyre on its roof. It opened in 1888, when Amsterdam decided it needed a concert hall worthy of a modern capital, and it was built on what was then open land at the edge of the city. What made it famous is invisible from out here. The main hall turned out to have some of the finest acoustics in the world, warm and clear, and musicians regularly rank it alongside the great halls of Vienna and Boston. Nobody fully planned that, which is part of the legend. Its orchestra, now the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, became one of the best in the world, and in the early twentieth century Gustav Mahler came here again and again to conduct his own symphonies for an audience that loved them before most of Europe did. Like everything in Amsterdam, the building stands on wooden piles driven into the soft ground, and in the 1980s it began to sink and needed a major rescue of its foundations. The glass entrance pavilion on the side dates from that time. Free lunchtime concerts are held on some weekdays outside the summer, so check before you go. Now walk north along the edge of Museumplein for about three minutes to the low modern building with the curving glass entrance.

Van Gogh Museum

This is the Van Gogh Museum, home to the largest collection of Vincent van Gogh's work anywhere, around two hundred paintings together with hundreds of drawings and letters. The main building was designed by the Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld and opened in 1973, and the curved glass entrance hall facing the square was added much later. The collection exists because of a family. Vincent painted for only about ten years and sold very little while he lived, and when he died in 1890 most of his work passed to his brother Theo, who had supported him all along. Theo died months later, and it was Theo's widow, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, who spent the rest of her life promoting Vincent's art, organizing exhibitions and publishing his letters. Her son, also named Vincent, later placed the collection in a foundation so that it would stay together, and this museum was built to hold it. There is a lovely thread to that story: when that nephew was born, Vincent painted a branch of almond blossom against a blue sky as a gift for the new parents, and that painting hangs inside today. Even if you are not going in, it is worth standing here to think about how close this work came to being forgotten. Then step out onto the open lawn right in front of you.