Amsterdam Forest

This guide to Amsterdam Forest traces how its woodland, lake and winding streams came to exist at all: dug by hand during the Great Depression, when thousands of unemployed men reshaped drowned farmland into rolling terrain, tree by tree. You'll meet the two figures behind the design, architect Cornelis van Eesteren and a young graduate named Jacoba Mulder who devoted her career to the project. Listen for how a queen opened the long straight stretch of water built for competitive rowing, while the rest of the forest was still rising from the mud.