Vondelpark

Park · Oud-ZuidAmsterdam,Netherlands

A long ribbon of lawns and curving paths past Amsterdam's museums, laid out in 1865 for the new villas and now the country's busiest park.

The Vondelpark is a long ribbon of green just past the museums, and it is the busiest park in the country. There is no single thing to see in it, which is the reason to come. On the first warm day of the year the whole city arrives at once and the lawns disappear under people, wine and speakers. The rest of the time it runs as infrastructure: commuters cycling through, joggers on the loop, prams, herons standing in the ponds with complete indifference. It was laid out from 1865 in the English landscape manner: curving paths, planted clumps of trees, water shaped to look accidental. A company of wealthy residents built it for the new villas going up around it, the public used it as their own, and the city ended up owning it. The name is Joost van den Vondel's, the seventeenth-century poet whose statue stands near the eastern end. The open-air theatre plays free through the summer, and the terraces fill on any evening the weather allows.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The first warm day is not a normal day — when spring arrives properly the lawns fill from noon and stay full; a bright weekday morning gives you the same park nearly empty.
Cut through rather than around — the park is a working cycle route across the city, so joining the flow west to east is how the locals actually use it.
The rose garden peaks in early summer — a formal enclosure of around seventy varieties tucked off the main paths, and easy to walk past without noticing.

Things to do

1
Claim a patch of grass and stay
The correct use of this park is to buy something, sit on the lawn and not move for three hours. On a warm weekend you will be one of several thousand people doing exactly that, and the crowd sorts itself into a hundred separate small parties without any friction at all.
2
Do the loop at seven in the morning
Before the commuters the paths belong to runners, dog walkers and the herons. The light comes low through the plane trees, the ponds are still, and it is the one time the busiest park in the Netherlands feels like a private garden.
3
Sit down at the open-air theatre
A small amphitheatre in the middle of the park has staged free open-air performances since 1974 — dance, theatre, comedy, classical, bands. Nothing is sold at a door: you sit on the grass banking with whatever you brought with you, among families, students and people who happened to be walking past.