Amsterdam in May 2020: the city without tourists

The canal ring with no one on it

There is a photograph I took in May 2020 that I still find difficult to reconcile with my experience of Amsterdam. It shows the Keizersgracht at around 10 in the morning, from the middle of the bridge near the Leidsestraat junction. The canal surface is still, reflecting the row of gabled houses on the opposite bank. There are no tour boats. There is no one else on the bridge. There are no cyclists in the lane below me. A single cyclist is visible in the far distance, disappearing around the bend.

In four previous trips to Amsterdam, I had never seen the canal ring look like this. Even in early December, even at 8am, there had always been tour boats idling, cyclists three-abreast, a queue outside the Anne Frank House extending back toward the Westerkerk. The absence was total and deeply strange.

This was late May 2020. The Netherlands had implemented social distancing measures in March and had not yet reopened museums or hospitality. I was a resident, not a tourist, which is why I was there at all. What I saw during those weeks was a version of Amsterdam that visitors rarely access, even in the city’s least-crowded seasons.

What the empty city revealed

The first thing you notice when the tourist layer is removed is how the city sounds. Amsterdam normally has a specific ambient sound: the soft clunk of boat engines on canals, the tram bell at junctions, dozens of languages overlapping. In May 2020, the canals were silent. Trams were running reduced schedules. The only language I heard on the streets around the Jordaan on most mornings was Dutch.

The second thing you notice is how local the infrastructure really is. The Albert Cuyp market in De Pijp — normally packed with a mix of tourists and locals — was operating in a reduced form for residents only, with distancing enforced by the stallholders. The shops that had stayed open were the ones serving the actual neighbourhood: bakeries, pharmacies, hardware shops, the Turkish grocer on the Kinkerstraat that has no English-language signage because it has never needed any. The cafés and restaurants that had shut — essentially all of them — were, in their absence, more obviously the tourist economy they partially were, rather than the neighbourhood institutions they appeared to be.

The Jordaan was quieter than I had ever seen it. Without the visitors moving through from the Anne Frank House to the market and onward, the neighbourhood revealed itself as what it actually is: a residential area where people live, with all the ordinary texture of a residential area. Children’s bicycles locked outside front doors. Old men on benches. The smell of lunch being cooked in windows left open above the canal.

The museum quarter in lockdown

The Museum Quarter was perhaps the strangest. The Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh Museum, Stedelijk, and Moco Museum were all closed. The Museumplein — normally one of the busiest tourist squares in northern Europe — had a few joggers and a couple of people throwing a frisbee. The I amsterdam letters that normally have a permanent queue of people climbing on them had been removed the previous year anyway, a gesture by the municipality toward managing overtourism, but their absence felt more poignant than usual.

Walking through the Museum Quarter without the institution that defines it is a lesson in how a place’s character is constructed. The architecture is there. The Vondelpark is there, and in fact more crowded than usual because Amsterdammers with nothing else open were using it constantly. But the purpose of the area — the slow queue to the Rijksmuseum entrance, the audio guide headphones, the postcards of Rembrandt’s Night Watch — was entirely suspended.

What the city was like for locals

A Dutch journalist I spoke to during this period described it as “seeing the room with the furniture taken out.” She had lived in Amsterdam her whole life and had gradually accommodated the tourist presence as a permanent feature of the cityscape. Its removal didn’t reveal a better city, she said, just a different one — smaller-feeling, more provincial, less cosmopolitan in the specific way that tourism creates cosmopolitanism, which is a cosmopolitanism of surfaces and languages rather than of actual exchange.

The amsterdam-centre without tourists is a city of about 900,000 people who go about their lives in a language you probably don’t speak, in a social landscape that has formed over centuries and includes you only if you’re willing to make the effort. It’s interesting in the way all ordinary life is interesting if you’re paying attention. It is not the version of the city that the tourist infrastructure is designed to show you.

What it changed about how I think about visiting cities

Seeing a tourist city without tourists changes what you notice on future visits. The museum visit that now seems less like a default and more like a choice. The restaurant that you’re now aware is serving both the permanent population and the transient one simultaneously. The street that has a local function — a school run, a delivery route, a social meeting point — that you were walking through without registering.

I started paying more attention, on subsequent trips, to the parts of Amsterdam that hadn’t been reconfigured for visitors. The streets east of the Amstel toward Amsterdam Oost. The residential northern reaches of the Jordaan, above the Brouwersgracht. Noord, across the IJ, which is in the middle of a slow transformation that hasn’t finished yet.

The amsterdam-history-overview guide provides useful context for understanding why the city’s tourist infrastructure developed where it did — in the 17th-century canal ring, around the 19th-century museum strip — and why other parts of the city are barely mentioned in tourist literature despite being large and inhabited.

Some things I genuinely missed

The museums, of course. The particular pleasure of a city canal cruise on a warm evening, which involves nothing more complicated than being on the water and looking at old buildings in good light. The canal cruise with audio guide is the kind of thing that is easy to take for granted when it’s available and that you miss specifically when it isn’t.

The food culture. The food market energy. The whole social texture of a city that is, under its tourism overlay, genuinely good at the things people travel to experience — art, architecture, food, water, cycling, a particular northern European light.

It all came back. By 2021 the museums were reopening cautiously, the canal cruises were running again, the Museumplein had its usual density of visitors. The streets around the Damrak were loud again. The things that were lost in that quiet May are available again and worth using.

When you’re there, with the crowds and the boat engines and the eight languages overlapping: the quiet city was there before the visitors arrived and will be there when they leave. It’s doing fine. You are visiting it, not rescuing it, which is how it should be.

The best time to visit Amsterdam guide looks at the full seasonal range of the city — from the overtourism peaks of July and August to the relative quiet of January — with honest notes on what changes and what stays the same.