Amsterdam historyAmsterdam history... before you plan your visit to Amsterdam, it may be interesting to learn more about how the city came to be - this will help shape your plans for sightseeing in the city and will hopefully increase your appreciation of what you will see while there. After all, Amsterdam is not an ordinary city - its history is unique, as you will soon see. To give a true picture of the history of Amsterdam, you would need to go back in time about 1,000 years. Back then, the area that is now part of the capital of the Netherlands consisted mostly of peat moor and swamp. As a result, much of the land was under water and transportation of goods and people mostly took place by water. In the eleventh century, three small towns popped up on the delta of the Amstel river, which was named "Ammerak" at the time, and the Boerenwetering river (which has since been filled). To the north-east of these small towns, you could find the turbulent Zuiderzee (South Sea), which was dammed in the 20th century and is now called the IJsselmeer. Since the three towns were constantly battling the sea and its floods, they decided to build a weir around the turn of the 12th century. The end result was, that both rivers now ended in the IJ (pronunciation: "i") river. Around the mid-13th century, a dam was built at the mouth of the IJ, creating a good harbor called "d'Ammerak". With the advent of this harbor, the heart of Amsterdam was born. Later, most of the harbor was dredged, creating the area that is now known as "Damrak". When you're walking on the Damrak toward the Dam, you're crossing the area where the beginnings of Amsterdam were.  As the small towns grew, a new village popped up in the area that is now known as "De Wallen" (the red-light district), which can loosely be translated as "The Walls". The name comes from the dams that were built here. In the mid-14th century, the towns banded together to form the first settlement called Amsterdam, and the city received its city rights. The city remained somewhat small for some time, until it gained popularity among the faithful when several miracles happened in and near the city in the 15th century. You can still see remnants of this part of Amsterdam's history in contemporary street names such as "Heiligeweg" ("Holy Road"). As the city started to grow faster and faster, the borders of Amsterdam had to constantly be redefined. This meant that the city walls and canals had to be built further and further out, creating the current downtown area with its well-known canals and bridges. These canals are also the reason that Amsterdam is sometimes referred to as "the Venice of the North". The downtown area now consists of some 90 "islands" separated by some 100 kilometers (60 miles) of canals and connected by about 200 bridges. The "Magere Brug" (Skinny Bridge) is probably the most well-known drawbridge in Amsterdam and well worth a visit, especially at night. The expansion of Amsterdam in concentric half-circles was inspired by the Renaissance and was at the time (the 17th century) the largest such expansion in the world: the city grew to one and a half times it size. The people living there tried to build the ideal city, with classy and sophisticated residential areas around the canals and one commercially-oriented neighborhood, the Jordaan. The canals, which previously served as a defensive perimeter around the city, took on a new role: that of a transportation network. The three most important canals, Herengracht, Keizersgracht and Prinsengracht, became ways of transporting goods and people to and from different areas of town.  Most of the people that lived in those houses along the Amsterdam canals were merchants who had made a fortune in Holland's overseas trade. This is reflected in many of the buildings near the major canals; one bend on Herengracht is called the "Golden Bend" because it contains the largest and most expensive canal houses. You can tell the wealth of the owner by the number of steps the stair contains: the more steps, the richer the owner was. The doors underneath the stairs were meant for the servants. In the 19th century, the city council decided to dredge several canals to create more room in the downtown area; this is how the present-day Damrak and Nieuwe Zijds Voorburgwal came to be. Luckily, many inhabitants of Amsterdam protested against further dredging, which is why the other canals still exist today. Related articles about AmsterdamReturn to the Holland-Travel-Guide.com homepage |