Westerkerk

The Westerkerk will be one of the most photographed spots in the city, and we brought you here to take a photo, but also to tell you a few things.

Look up at that tower. At 87 metres, it is the tallest church tower in Amsterdam, crowned by a replica of the imperial crown of Maximilian of Austria. Here is the secret: the soft, marshy Amsterdam soil made it impossible to build the tower entirely in stone. The upper section is actually wood, painted to look like stone. Beauty built on a quiet compromise.

Somewhere beneath your feet lies the painter Rembrandt van Rijn. Not in a celebrated tomb, but in an unmarked collective grave. By the end of his life he had lost everything. His remains shared a plot with strangers, cleared away after just twenty years to make room for others.

A few streets from here, a young girl named Anne Frank listened to the bells of this very tower from her hiding place. She wrote about the carillon more than once in her diary. It comforted her. When the Germans took the bells away, she wrote about that too. After the war, the bells came back.