The medieval heart of Amsterdam

Stand on the station square with the long brick front of Centraal at your back and the city opening ahead across a strip of water. The square was named in 1889, when the station opened, and by 1900 it had replaced the Dam as the city's tram hub; it still hums with bells and bicycles. Prins Hendrikkade, running along the water, was named in 1879 for Prince Hendrik, the seafaring royal known as the Navigator. Before the station existed this was the city's northern shore, where milk boats from Ransdorp and Zunderdorp, the villages across the IJ, tied up each morning. The walk slips out through the IJ-passage beneath the station and loops back along the water. You are standing correctly when both station towers rise behind you and the trams curl around the square ahead.

Out through the IJ-passage and onto Prins Hendrikkade, the old harbour front, five minutes along the water. For centuries this was the edge of Amsterdam: open water lay where the station now stands, and an inn of 1662, the Nieuwe Stadsherberg, stood out in the IJ until 1872, when the ground for the station island began to be raised and it was pulled down. A patchwork of older names, the herring-packers' wharf among them, was swept into one in 1879, when the waterfront was renamed for Prince Hendrik. Gulls, tram bells, the slap of water against the wall. You cannot miss the arrival: the basilica's twin towers and central dome rise directly across the water from the station.

Prins Hendrikkade gives way to Nieuwebrugsteeg, a lane that drops you off the harbour front and into the oldest side of town. Oudezijds Voorburgwal, the canal at its end, began as a creek and takes its name from an earth rampart: when new walls went up around 1385, the old one became the front wall, the Voorburgwal, and the city crept out beyond it. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Amsterdammers called it the Velvet Canal. Walk the water's edge reading the house fronts rather than the skyline; the gables lean in close here. The stop is a narrow brick canal house at numbers 38 and 40, plain-fronted among its neighbours.

Keep the canal beside you along Oudezijds Voorburgwal, three minutes south, with the tower of the Oude Kerk already showing above the roofs. This stretch of water gave the Dutch an idiom. Barrels of Delft beer were unloaded at the Bierkaai here, and the dockers who rolled them were so famously hard that fighting against the beer quay, vechten tegen de bierkaai, still means taking on a lost cause. The canal has another odd claim to fame: on the standard Dutch deck of playing cards it is the view printed on the ace of diamonds. You have arrived when the canal-side houses fall back and the church takes over, brick and lead, filling its own small square, the tower directly above you.

East from the church, the lanes tighten. Oudekerksplein, the ground around the Oude Kerk, was the churchyard until 1655, when the graves were cleared and the dead moved outside the city; you are crossing a former cemetery. Oudekennissteeg leads to the Majoor Bosshardtbrug, named for the Salvation Army major who worked these streets for decades, and over the second canal, Oudezijds Achterburgwal, dug in 1367 as the city's eastern edge. Monnikenstraat remembers the Grey Friars whose friary stood here from 1464 until 1578. Then the buildings simply stop. Nieuwmarkt has been a square only since 1614, when the water around the old gate was vaulted over; in 1975 it rioted against the metro, and it served as a car park until the early 1990s. The turreted Waag stands alone in the middle of it.

Bloedstraat, the short lane back out of the square, has a name that stops you. From 1464 a friary of Grey Friars stood on this ground; it was destroyed in 1578 and the street was laid along the line of its church. The name most likely comes from the friary's bloetcamer, a chamber that may have served as a torture room, though one seventeenth-century chronicler claimed the Duke of Alva's Blood Council had sat here. Oudezijds Achterburgwal, the canal you follow south, carries more than a hundred national monuments on its banks, and in 1780 the American diplomat John Adams lodged on it for over half a year. The stop is the Paulusbroedersluis, the stone bridge where a busy cross-street meets the canal; stand mid-bridge with the tall narrow houses on both banks.

Oude Doelenstraat carries you west, out of the canals and onto the Dam in four minutes. Unremarkable today, it is one of the oldest lines on the map: from the Middle Ages it was part of Amsterdam's main east-west axis, running from the Dam to the dyke that was then the city's eastern limit. Its name comes from the Oude Doelen, a building of 1382 where the civic guard met to practise, knocked down early in the sixteenth century to widen it. Then the walls fall away and the Dam opens. Ships moored at the Dam itself until 1841, and in 1808 Louis Napoleon had the old weigh house here demolished because it spoiled his view from the palace. The palace and its cupola on one side, the white column of the National Monument on the other.

Cross to the Damrak side of the square and come along the front of the palace, three minutes. The Damrak was part of Amsterdam's oldest harbour, the last straight reach of the Amstel before it met the IJ, and the southern end you stand on was only filled in 1845 and 1883. In the seventeenth century dozens of shops traded along its single quay, about ten of them bookshops, at rents that were already notorious. Further up, the houses on the east bank still stand with their back walls in the water. The Nieuwe Kerk is beside the palace: a Gothic church of tall windows and no great tower, church and town hall sharing one corner of the square.

The shortest leg: Mozes en Aäronstraat, the narrow street between church and palace, two minutes. Nobody knows when it got its name, only why: Moses for the worldly power housed in the town hall on one side, Aaron for the spiritual power of the church on the other. In 1942 the occupiers renamed it after the post office; on 18 May 1945 Amsterdam gave the name back. It delivers you onto Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal, a canal until 1884 where the barges from South Holland tied up, and for most of the twentieth century the city's newspaper boulevard: De Telegraaf and de Volkskrant both had their offices here until the papers drifted away between 1967 and 1976. Magna Plaza is directly across the street: bands of red brick and pale stone, turrets and a steep roof, far too grand for a post office.

A loop around the back of the palace, five minutes: south along Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal, then Paleisstraat brings you round to the Dam. The filled-in canal you walk beside was an early adopter: electric trams from 1903, Amsterdam's first traffic policeman posted here in 1912, the city's first parking meters in 1964. Paleisstraat is younger than it looks. The name was fixed by council decision on 29 March 1875, after the town hall of 1648 that had become a palace; before that, part of it was named for the city's oldest hospital, a fourteenth-century gasthuis. Coming back onto the square, the building you have been circling finally shows its face. Stop on the Dam before the long classical front, the sculpted pediment and the cupola above it.

Leave the Dam by Rokin, the broad street heading south, seven minutes with one alley at the end. You are walking on the river: Rokin is the old course of the Amstel, and this stretch was only filled in 1933 and 1936; until 1933 a little ferry carried people across. When the metro was dug beneath it, between 2003 and 2020, archaeologists in the pit found a huge haul of objects from 1300 to 1900: whole shoes, jugs, bones, pots nearly intact, because the river ran calmer here than on the Damrak. Duifjessteeg, the alley you take, is named for a brewery, 't Duyfje, that brewed here from 1580 to 1640. It ends on a crowded shopping street; a sandstone gateway stands between the shop fronts there, carved with children above the arch. That is the museum.

Sint Luciënsteeg, cut through in 1532, runs along the museum's flank, and its wall is a museum in itself: forty-seven gable stones rescued from houses demolished across the city and set into the brick here between 1924 and 1927, ships, animals, saints and trades, the house signs people used before street numbers. Along Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal and into Gedempte Begijnensloot, five minutes. That last name means filled Beguine ditch: the water here once ringed the Begijnhof and in 1342 marked the western boundary of Amsterdam; it was filled in 1865, partly for the sake of public health. Through the gate the noise drops away. You are inside when a lawn opens before you, ringed by old house fronts with a church on the green. People still live here, so go quietly.

Back out through Gedempte Begijnensloot and the walk ends two minutes later on Spui. The name is older than the square: Spui was the water that marked Amsterdam's southern limit until 1425, and it was not filled until 1882. A horse tram ran across it from 1877; since a redesign in 1996 it has been almost entirely car-free, and on Fridays a book market fills the paving. The long sober classical front on the south side is the Maagdenhuis, built between 1783 and 1787. You have arrived when the lanes release you into open space, bookshops on the corners and a small bronze boy on a low plinth on the southern half of the square. The walk ends at his feet, between the medieval centre behind you and the canal ring beyond.