Amsterdam
The Netherlands' capital, a city of canals below sea level
Amsterdam is a city engineered out of water. A web of concentric canals, dug in the Golden Age and now lined with narrow gabled merchant houses, rings the old center, crossed by hundreds of bridges and busier with bicycles than with cars. Much of it sits below sea level, kept dry by an ancient discipline of dikes and pumps. The constitutional capital of the Netherlands, it is a compact, tolerant, intensely livable city whose canal ring is recognized by UNESCO and whose museums hold Rembrandt and Van Gogh.
The city lies in the flat, reclaimed delta of the Amstel and IJ rivers in the province of North Holland, with most of the ground around two metres below sea level. The land is entirely man-made in the sense that it is held against the sea by a constant labor of dikes, canals, and pumping stations — a defining feature of the low-lying Dutch landscape. The maritime climate brings mild, wet weather year-round, and the famously flat terrain makes the bicycle the natural way to move.
Amsterdam grew from a thirteenth-century fishing village that dammed the Amstel River — the dam that gave the city its name — into the trading powerhouse of the seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age, when its merchants and the world's first stock exchange financed a global commercial empire. The canal ring dates from that boom. Today Amsterdam is the country's capital and cultural heart, a center of finance, design, and tourism, and a byword for a liberal, open civic culture.