Amsterdam: Oude Zijde, Rembrandt and the Shipping House
The city's oldest building standing in the red-light district, a 1488 gate that became an anatomy theatre, the first purpose-built Protestant church, the house Rembrandt lost, and the shipping palace that names the empire on its walls.
This is a self-guided walk, not a guided tour with a leader: no booking, no fixed start time. See the walking route and the walking map before you go, then follow the numbers — the audio guide plays by itself as you reach each stop. Free, with no app to install and no sign-up.
At ~50 min it fits a half day of independent travel, and joining it to another walk in Amsterdam makes a full-day itinerary.
More walking tours in Amsterdam
- Amsterdam: Dam Square and the Canal Ring — 5 stops, ~60 min
- Amsterdam: Jodenbuurt and Plantage — 6 stops, ~45 min
All Netherlands walking tours · All 149 routes
Amsterdam, Netherlands · ~50 min · 1.9 km · 6 stops
Stops on this walk
1. Oude Kerk
Amsterdam's oldest building, standing in the middle of the red-light district.
Consecrated in 1306 and built on the spot where the city began, the Old Church is the oldest building in Amsterdam. The floor is made of 2,500 gravestones; Rembrandt's wife Saskia is under one of them. The Reformation reached Amsterdam in 1578 and the church was stripped in a single campaign — statues broken, altars removed, walls whitewashed. The painted ceiling survived only because it was too high to reach. Look up: it is the largest medieval wooden vault in Europe, and the paint on it is original.
A medieval church that never moved while the neighbourhood around it became what it is. Amsterdam's habit of tolerating what it cannot forbid is on display within fifty metres.
2. The Waag on Nieuwmarkt
A 1488 city gate that became a weigh house, then an anatomy theatre.
This is the oldest surviving non-religious building in Amsterdam, built in 1488 as St Anthony's Gate in the city wall. When the city outgrew the wall the moat was filled in, the gate lost its job, and it became the public weigh house — the Waag — where goods were measured and taxed. The upper floor was given to the surgeons' guild as an anatomy theatre. Rembrandt painted The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp in that room in 1632. In the Second World War the square outside was where Jewish residents of the surrounding quarter were assembled for deportation; a small memorial marks it.
One building held the city's boundary, its tax office, its medical school and its darkest morning. Amsterdam reuses rather than replaces, and the layers stay readable.
3. Zuiderkerk
The first church built for Protestant worship in the Netherlands.
Finished in 1611, the South Church was the first in the northern Netherlands designed from scratch as a Protestant church rather than converted from a Catholic one. Hendrick de Keyser built it, and the difference is structural: a wide hall where everyone can hear, with the pulpit rather than an altar at the centre. Christopher Wren studied the tower before rebuilding London's churches; Monet painted it. Three of Rembrandt's children are buried here — he lived two streets away and lost them in infancy. The church stopped holding services in 1929 and is now a municipal building.
Protestant architecture had to be invented, not inherited. This is the building where the Dutch worked out what a church looks like when the point is hearing rather than seeing.
4. Rembrandt House
The house he bought at the top and lost at the bottom.
Rembrandt bought this in 1639 for 13,000 guilders, an enormous sum, on a mortgage he never managed to clear. He lived and taught here for twenty years, at the height of his fame, with a studio on the upper floor lit from the north. In 1656 he was declared insolvent. The inventory drawn up to sell his possessions is the reason the house can be furnished today exactly as it was — every object listed, room by room. He moved to a rented house in the Jordaan and died there in 1669, and the inventory that ruined him became the record that preserved him.
The etching press upstairs still works and is demonstrated daily. Rembrandt made more money from prints than paintings — the copies were the business, not the sideline.
5. Montelbaanstoren
A defence tower that got a decorative spire once it was useless.
The brick base went up in 1516 as part of the city wall, guarding the shipyards on the eastern islands. Within a few decades the wall was obsolete and the tower had no military job left. So in 1606 the city put an ornamental spire on it, by the same Hendrick de Keyser who built the Zuiderkerk. Sailors used it as a landmark to find the harbour, and it leaned badly enough during construction that the city had to pull it upright with ropes. Rembrandt drew it more than once; it is now a canal-side office.
Amsterdam rarely demolishes. When a building stops being needed the city gives it a hat and a new job, which is why the skyline is a list of obsolete purposes.
6. Scheepvaarthuis
The first building of the Amsterdam School, covered in the empire that paid for it.
Built between 1912 and 1916 for six shipping companies, this is the first work of the Amsterdam School — expressionist brickwork, wrought iron, stained glass, every surface worked. The plan is shaped like a ship's bow, pointing at the water. The decoration is a catalogue of Dutch shipping: navigators, compass roses, and personifications of the places the companies sailed to, most of them colonies. It is a beautiful building that is also an honest document of where the money came from. It is now a hotel, and the interiors are largely intact.
Look at the figures on the facade before you decide what to feel about the building. Amsterdam's golden age and its colonial century are the same century, and this wall does not hide it.