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Canal houses, festivals, houseboats and cruises: the best ways to experience Amsterdam's canals

The Dutch capital is a watery wonderland. Amsterdam's Unesco World Heritage-listed Canal Ring was built during the Golden Age after the seafaring port grew beyond its medieval walls, and authorities devised a ground-breaking expansion plan. Today Amsterdam has more canals than Venice – 165, covering 100km, crisscrossing 90 islands and spanned by 1281 bridges – which are enchanting to explore year-round.

Prinsengracht
Houseboats line Prinsengracht, just one of Amsterdam's World Heritage-listed canals. Image by Catherine Le Nevez/Lonely Planet
Evolution of the canals

Amsterdam's picturesque canals aren't just aesthetic: in the early 1600s they were crucial to drain and reclaim the waterlogged land and separate the land and sea. Much of this low-lying region is polder – land that once lay underwater. It was retrieved by building dykes across inlets and rivers, and pumping the water out with windmills (and later with steam and diesel pumps). To learn how integral the canals were in Amsterdam city planning, take a fascinating 45-minute audioguided tour of canal museum Het Grachtenhuis.

Most of the canals' locks close three times per week to allow fresh water to be pumped from the IJsselmeer lake, creating a current that flushes the stagnant canal water out through open locks and pumping it out to sea – check out the mighty Amstelsluizen on the Amstel river to see this feat of engineering in action.

Amstelsluizen
The impressive locks of Amstelsluizen date back to 1674. Image by Catherine Le Nevez/Lonely Planet
Navigating the waterways

The city's major semicircular ('core') canals are, from the centre, the Singel, originally a moat that defended Amsterdam's outer limits; the grand Herengracht ('Gentlemen's Canal'), where Amsterdam's wealthiest residents moved upon its completion; Keizersgracht (Emperor's Canal) and lively Prinsengracht, named after William the Silent, Prince of Orange and the first Dutch royal. To minimise your chances of getting lost in their concentric web, remember that, the singular Singel aside, they're laid out in alphabetical order.

Cutting across these core canals like bicycle spokes, the major radial canals – also in alphabetical order from west to east – are the exquisite Brouwersgracht (Brewers Canal), named for its 16th- and 17th-century breweries; Leidsegracht, once the main water route to its namesake city, Leiden; and Reguliersgracht, which takes its name from an order of monks whose monastery was located nearby. Reguliersgracht is where you'll find the iconic 'seven bridges', a quirk of construction that allows you to peer through the arches of seven humpbacked bridges, which twinkle with tiny gold lights come nightfall. (Where the Keizersgracht and Reguliersgracht intersect, you can count even more bridges – 15 in total – as you peer east-west and north-south.)

Prinsengracht-flowers-on-bridge
Prinsengracht, the liveliest of Amsterdam's canals and a favourite hangout spot for locals. Image by Catherine Le Nevez/Lonely Planet
Canal houses and houseboats

Lining the banks, slender canal houses tip forward at precarious angles. Due to their near-vertical staircases, owners needed an easy way to move large goods and furniture to the upper floors. Hoists were built into the gables, to lift objects up and in through the windows, the slant allowing loading without smashing the facade. Property tax used to be paid on the house's frontage, meaning the narrower the facade, the less you paid. The ornate gables concealed the roof from public view, and helped identify the house until 1795, when the Netherlands' French occupiers introduced house numbers.

canal-houses-Prinsengracht
Slender canal houses squeeze together hosting bars, boutique stores and hotels. Image by Catherine Le Nevez/Lonely Planet

Opportunities to stay in Amsterdam's classical canal houses abound: many now house hotels across the price spectrum, from bargain Hotel Brouwer to the boutique Canal House, and the inimitable Hotel Pulitzer, ranging over 25 interconnected, history-steeped houses, with its own