It’s fitting that Amsterdam’s Museum of the Canals is in a classic canal house on the Herengracht. As Dad & I went in, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had found the museum on a list of “fun things to do in Amsterdam”. And a brief spin through a few reviews said it would take about an hour, was fun, and was worth doing. The most common picture in any of them looked like this:
Maybe my searches were just unlucky, or perhaps I should have actually tried the museum’s website. (More on that later.) But I like that sense of adventure in a local attraction, so I was OK with the uncertainty.
Anyway, we paid our entrance fees and were told that the tour started on the 4th floor—fortunately, there was an elevator—and begins with a presentation that runs about every 10 minutes. The big digital timer said we had about 8 minutes to go.
At the appointed minute, we headed up and entered what appeared to be a waiting room with an atmospheric display…
Until the lights went out and the presentation started. The 3-dimensional video diorama (for lack of a better description) covers the early history of the city. You can see that the Amstel is the major water feature; it’s 14th-century Amsterdam. There were two expansions in the next two centuries, bringing new canals on either side of the river. But the major canal belt was not built yet.
The next room is where I realized my expectations were going off the rails. I had expected that after the opening presentation, we would wander curated exhibits at our own pace. Not so. The museum tour is a series of rooms, each with audio-visual accompaniment.
In the second room, a digital display table came to life as we watched and listened to a “city planning meeting” in 1613. Amsterdam was bursting at the seams and needed to expand. The back-and-forth discussion touched on various considerations—security, financing, and so on—before concluding with a decision to build one half of a two-part expansion.
In the next room, we see the engineering. The display includes the piles that created land between the canals. The video presentation demonstrates the construction methods in action.
The fourth room focuses on the residential canal houses. The dollhouse that normally occupies the table was absent on our visit (refurbishment).
Without the dollhouse, it appeared there was only audio to accompany this room. But halfway through, I realized that there were “peepholes” in the black-and-white line drawings of canal houses on the walls.
These were so fun! We wandered around the room, peeking through the holes to find scenes typical of the canal house. I definitely felt a bit like a voyeur. And it was also a fun challenge to get good pictures. Not all came out as well as the ones below.
This was the room where I felt like the tour format chafed a bit. We were chivvied into the next room, but I would have happily spent a bit more time in this one.
In the final room, we found the scale model that I had seen online when looking up the museum. This model shows the city as it stands today, with all four expansions completed. The audio runs with visuals of the city on the screens above, discussing the current state and future challenges.
After the last room, we headed back down to the final two areas of the museum. As we went down the stairs, Dad commented that he wasn’t sure he would think of this as a museum. I was pretty willing to give it museum status—but wasn’t so sure I would call it a museum about the canals. It felt more like a general history of Amsterdam.
The first floor did not quite change either of our minds. One room contains a series of murals depicting woodland scenes. Another, appointed with rich brocade wall coverings and dramatic window treatments, houses temporary exhibitions.
Back in Massachusetts, I did some exploring on the museum’s website. Here was the well-organized, written storytelling I had expected to find in the museum itself! And with more details of the canals, too.
To be fair, much of it had been covered by the multimedia presentation. But I realized that I hadn’t absorbed it as well as I might have, moving from room to room on a schedule. Perhaps Dad was right, and something essential was missing. After all, “muse” is in the word museum. And there was no time to muse as we moved from room to room.
That said, I have often traveled with children. Of several ages. When my kids were younger, I would have been really grateful for a museum experience like this, accessible to everyone.
Hindsight is 20/20, but I wouldn’t change anything. If I had read all the history on the website first, the tour might have felt superficial. Instead, it was engaging and made a good foundation for what I would later read.
If you have some space on your agenda, the Grachtenmuseum is definitely worth a visit. The timed presentation is 45 minutes, and you could spend another 45 minutes or so in the temporary exhibitions. Overall, plan for an hour or two—a morning or afternoon. And there’s no need to buy tickets (about €20) in advance.
One of my favorite discoveries on the website is a list of other museums that are inside canal houses. Now I want to go back and see some of them!
