Museum District

But if this cultural Valhalla isn't really your thing, the vast expanses of green on the modern Museumplein and romantic tree-lined avenues and lakes of Vondelpark are perfect places for people-watching, while the city's best upmarket fashion emporia on the PC Hooftstraat and antiques shops along Nieuwe Spiegelstraat are everything a shopaholic (or window version) could wish for.

It's always been a plush district. At the end of the 19th century, the city wanted a zone for luxury housing here but was dithering on how to develop it even as the cultural institutions were being put in place: the Rijksmuseum (1885), the Concertgebouw (1886), and the Stedelijk (1895). Eventually the decision to create an open space was agreed. In 1973, the Van Gogh Museum joined the square. The past few years have seen some well-publicized cultural chaos with delays and confusion over the redevelopment of the Rijksmuseum and Stedelijk, but finally the scaffolding is coming down and it looks like they will be worth the wait.

There are a couple of interesting diversions for the architecturally curious around the park. If you enter via the gate on the Nassaukade, look up to your right. That building with the jutting gold capsule is the work of supercool architect Rem Koolhaas in a not-so-SuperDutch moment. Roemer Visscherstraat 20-30a is a stretch of housing illustrating seven national architectural styles from German romantic to English cottage built in 1894.