Amsterdam

The first thing to get right about Amsterdam is the scale. The canal ring — planned in 1610, dug over the following half-century, on the UNESCO list since 2010 — takes under an hour to cross on foot, and the tram you were about to catch is slower. So the question is not how to cover the city. It is which four or five things you actually want, and what you notice on the walks in between.

The ones people come for

Go to the Rijksmuseum first, because it is doing something now that it will not be doing forever. Rembrandt's Night Watch hangs at the head of the Gallery of Honour inside a purpose-built glass chamber, and the conservators of Operation Night Watch work on it while you stand there — laying solvent-soaked tissue over the yellowed varnish, then lifting it away and checking the result under a microscope with a cotton swab. Restoration usually happens in a back room, behind a sign apologising for the painting's absence. Here it happens at eye level, and the slowness is the thing that gets you: this has been going on since 2019. The rest of the building runs to thousands of objects you will not see. Book a slot before eleven or after three, find the Vermeers, and get out before your legs decide for you.

Ten minutes across the grass of Museumplein, the Van Gogh Museum holds more than 200 of his paintings, 500 drawings and some 750 letters — more of him than exists anywhere else. What makes it work is that it is hung in the order he made it. You start in the Dutch years, where the palette is the colour of wet earth and the family in The Potato Eaters looks carved out of the same stuff. Then Paris. Then Arles, where the yellow arrives so abruptly it reads as a decision rather than a style. By the top floor there are eighteen months left. The letters, which most people walk past on the way to the Sunflowers, are where he explains in his own handwriting what he thought he was doing.

The third is the Anne Frank House, which asks for planning, not stamina. Tickets are sold online only, for a fixed time slot, released every Tuesday at 10am for dates six weeks out; nothing is held back for the door. What you walk into, past the hinged bookcase that Bep Voskuijl's father built in August 1942 to cover the doorway, is deliberately empty. Otto Frank came back alone in 1945, found the rooms stripped, and asked that they stay that way. So there is no furniture to arrange your feelings around — only the postcards and pictures of film actors Anne glued to her bedroom wall, and the pencil marks on the plaster where the two sisters were measured. Anne grew thirteen centimetres in there. Margot grew one.

Getting off the tourist track without trying

The best free thing in Amsterdam leaves from behind Centraal every few minutes. The GVB ferries across the IJ cost nothing, carry bikes at no charge, and have no barrier and no ticket — you walk on. Buiksloterweg is a four-minute hop to the foot of the A'DAM tower; the NDSM boat takes about a quarter of an hour and lands at a scrapped shipyard now given over to murals, container studios and a street-art museum, with Europe's largest flea market filling the halls on its monthly weekends. Go late in the afternoon so the crossing home has the city lit up in front of you.

For a drink after that, cross to the Funenkade in Oost, where the city's 1911 municipal bathhouse sits at the foot of De Gooyer — at 26.6 metres, the tallest wooden windmill in the Netherlands. It was converted into a brewhouse in 1985 and has been Brouwerij 't IJ ever since. The tasting room runs on long shared tables, and on a warm evening the terrace under the sails is one of the few places in the centre-adjacent city where nobody is in a hurry.

Eat on Albert Cuypstraat. The market has been fixed in De Pijp since 1912, runs Monday to Saturday, and stretches most of a kilometre — a couple of hundred stalls of fruit and fabric and fish. The trick is to eat as you walk rather than sit down: raw herring with chopped onion if you are willing, and a stroopwafel from one of the stalls that presses them on a hot iron to order, so the syrup inside is still liquid when it reaches your hand. It is a different object entirely from the packet version. On Sundays the market is shut and De Pijp's cafés absorb everyone instead.

Saturday mornings, the Noordermarkt in the Jordaan does the quieter version: an organic farmers' market since 1987, the first of its kind in the country, 9am to 4pm beside Hendrick de Keyser's church, with queues for cheese rather than souvenirs. Come back Monday morning and the same square is a flea market of other people's coats and lamps.

The Jordaan, and two things that cost nothing

The Jordaan is worth an hour with nothing planned in it. It was laid out in the seventeenth century for the artisans and immigrants who could not afford the grand canals a few streets east, and the street names still read like a florist's inventory — Bloemgracht is flower canal, Egelantiersgracht is named for a wild rose. The water here is narrower, the bridges lower, and the brown cafés (bruine kroegen, for the stain a century of smoking left on the walls) are the reason to be here after dark rather than any bar with a rope outside.

Vondelpark is 47 hectares of grass fifteen minutes west of Museumplein, and from May to September its Openluchttheater puts on more than a hundred performances at no charge — comedy on Saturday nights, classical music on Sunday mornings played to an audience lying flat on the lawn. And on Wednesdays at 12.30, every week except in July and August, the Concertgebouw opens its Recital Hall for a half-hour lunchtime concert: sometimes a conservatory ensemble, sometimes an open rehearsal by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, always free. Tickets go online a week ahead, two per person, and almost nobody visiting knows about it.

The rest is walking, which Amsterdam rewards more than almost anywhere — as long as you stay out of the red bike lanes, because the people in them are going to work and will not slow down for you.