Amsterdam

Amsterdam is a city built to a plan: a half-ring of canals begun in 1613, dug when the town was the richest port in Europe and now on the UNESCO list. Houses were taxed on their width, so they grew tall and thin, leaning forward with hoisting beams still bolted to the gables. Ninety islands and some fifteen hundred bridges later, the bicycle remains the honest way to cross it. The merchants' fortunes left the collections behind: the Rijksmuseum and Rembrandt's Night Watch, the Van Gogh Museum with two hundred canvases, the Anne Frank House in the rooms themselves. Brown cafés, panelled and smoke-darkened, pour beer beside deep-fried bitterballen, and three centuries of trade with the East left rijsttafel on the menu. Vondelpark and the far larger Amsterdamse Bos take the city outdoors, and the Zaanse Schans Windmills still turn a short way north.