AMSTERDAM
A city built on 11 million wooden poles, where Rembrandt went bankrupt and the world’s first stock market crash brought a nation to its knees — over tulips.
Explore Amsterdam Your Way
Free audio walking tours that take you beyond the highlights. Discover hidden stories at your own pace.
A Short History of Amsterdam
Period 1:
From Swamp to Golden Age
Amsterdam began as a muddy fishing settlement where the Amstel met the IJ. A dam built around 1270 gave the city its name — and its ambition. By the seventeenth century, that small trading post had become the center of a global empire.
The Golden Age transformed everything. Ships returned from Asia laden with spices, the world's first stock exchange opened on Rokin, and merchants built the canal ring we still walk today. Rembrandt painted in a house on Jodenbreestraat — and went bankrupt there too, his possessions auctioned off when he couldn't pay his debts. The same city that celebrated him let him die in obscurity.
This was Amsterdam's great contradiction: extraordinary wealth built on global trade, but also on exploitation. The warehouses along the canals stored goods from plantations where enslaved people worked. The Golden Age gleamed, but its foundations were darker than the paintings suggest.
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Period 2:
Occupation, Resistance, and Memory
The Second World War tore through Amsterdam's soul. Before 1940, the city was home to eighty thousand Jews — artists, diamond cutters, market traders, professors. By 1945, fewer than five thousand remained. The deportations happened in plain sight: families marched to trains at the Hollandsche Schouwburg, children separated from parents at the crèche across the street.
But resistance flickered throughout the city. In February 1941, Amsterdam staged the only mass protest against Nazi persecution of Jews in occupied Europe — the February Strike. Workers walked off the job, trams stopped running, and for two days the city stood still. The strike was crushed, but it became a symbol of defiance that the city still commemorates.
In a hidden annex on Prinsengracht, a teenage girl wrote a diary that would become one of the most-read books in history. Anne Frank's words gave the world a personal witness to what statistics cannot convey. Her hiding place is now a museum, but the neighborhood around it holds other stories — of helpers, of betrayal, of the thin line between courage and survival.
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With ROODS, you don't just see the surface — you uncover these hidden stories and explore the entire city in your own way, guided by the voices of its past
Getting Around Amsterdam
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Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam & ROODS: Walking Routes Through Natural History
5 min read
Rotterdam
Nature
Culture
Free Amsterdam Guide: Ferries, Courtyards, Market and a Smarter Way to Explore
4 min read
Amsterdam
Architecture
Culture
Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam & ROODS: Walking Routes Through Natural History
5 min read
Rotterdam
Nature
Culture
Free Amsterdam Guide: Ferries, Courtyards, Market and a Smarter Way to Explore
4 min read
Amsterdam
Architecture
Culture
Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam & ROODS: Walking Routes Through Natural History
5 min read
Rotterdam
Nature
Culture