With a main hall designed to hold up to 6,000 people, AFAS Live is one of the largest purpose-built concert venues in the Netherlands, standing in the Amsterdam-Zuidoost district beside the Johan Cruijff ArenA. The hall, known as the Black Box, was built specifically for amplified music and is widely praised by touring acts for its acoustics. The venue opened in 2001 as the Heineken Music Hall, constructed to a design by the architect Frits van Dongen at a cost of around 30 million euros. After.....

Each winter the cavernous halls of the Amsterdam exhibition centre are transformed into a vast indoor winter wonderland, where ice skating, alpine-style food and festive entertainment combine to bring a taste of the mountains to the flat Dutch lowlands. Amsterdam Winter Paradise has become a popular seasonal fixture for families and groups during the cold and dark weeks around the turn of the year. The event recreates the atmosphere of an alpine winter holiday indoors, sheltered from the rain a.....

Near the tower of the Westerkerk, a short walk from the house where she hid, a bronze statue of Anne Frank stands in quiet tribute to the young diarist whose words have come to symbolise the millions murdered in the Holocaust. The slight, upright figure of the girl has become a place of remembrance and reflection in the heart of Amsterdam. Anne Frank was a Jewish girl whose family hid from the Nazi occupiers in a concealed annexe behind a canal-house for more than two years, until they were bet.....

The largest stadium in the Netherlands and the home of the great football club Ajax, the Johan Cruijff ArenA opened in 1996 in the Bijlmer district to the south-east of the centre, and was the first stadium in Europe to be fitted with a fully retractable roof. Built over almost three years at considerable cost and opened by Queen Beatrix with a match against the Italian giants of Milan, it was conceived as a multi-functional arena from the outset, able to host not only football but also concerts.....

Confronting a subject that most prefer to avoid, Museum Tot Zover is the Dutch museum of death and funerary culture, a thoughtful and surprisingly absorbing institution set at the edge of one of the largest cemeteries in Amsterdam. Its name, which loosely translates as so far or thus far, hints at the gentle, reflective tone with which it approaches the universal experience of mortality, treating death not as a morbid taboo but as a natural part of life worthy of curiosity and contemplation. Lo.....

Built around the simple but irresistible idea of turning the world on its head, The Upside Down is an interactive museum of optical illusions and topsy-turvy rooms designed to delight visitors and to produce the kind of playful, gravity-defying photographs that have become a craze in cities around the globe. Located in the south of Amsterdam, the attraction consists of a series of cleverly constructed sets and installations in which the normal rules of up and down no longer apply, allowing visi.....