The Red Light District (De Wallen)

Neighborhood · De Wallen (Centrum)Amsterdam,Netherlands

Amsterdam's oldest quarter, medieval lanes and canals around a 1306 church, where licensed sex work is done from ground-floor windows edged in red.

De Wallen is the oldest part of Amsterdam: medieval lanes and small canals east of Dam Square, the city's first harbour district. Sex work here is legal, licensed and taxed, and it is done from ground-floor windows edged in red. In the middle of it stands the Oude Kerk, consecrated around 1306 and the oldest building in the city, with the windows glowing red around its churchyard. That collision is the district. The Netherlands lifted its ban on brothels in 2000, bringing the trade under labour and health regulation rather than trying to end it. Cannabis is sold in permitted coffeeshops under a policy that tolerates the retail while the supply stays illegal, a contradiction the Dutch acknowledge. By daylight the quarter is a different place: quiet, genuinely pretty, some very good small canals, and the church open. After dark the lanes fill, and the city's long argument about what mass tourism has done here becomes visible on the pavement.

Worth knowing

Good to know

No photographs of the women, ever — it is prohibited, actively enforced and the one rule that reliably provokes a confrontation. Phones down along the window lanes.
By day it is a medieval quarter — mornings are calm enough to see the architecture and the canals properly, which is what most visitors never do here.
Stay on the lit and busy lanes late — the district is well policed and generally safe, but the narrow connecting alleys after midnight are where the drunk crowds funnel.

Things to do

1
Walk it at ten in the morning
The windows are mostly shuttered, the crowds are gone and what is left is a medieval street plan with some of the prettiest small canals in Amsterdam. It is the version of this district almost no visitor sees, and it takes about twenty minutes.
2
Stand in the churchyard and turn round
Go into the open ground around the Oude Kerk and make a full circle. The oldest building in Amsterdam is on one side of you and the red-lit windows are a few metres away on the other, and neither of them is a recent arrival here. This corner is the whole district compressed into one place.