Amsterdam

Amsterdam is built for looking up and slowing down — a city of gabled merchant houses leaning over a UNESCO ring of seventeenth-century canals, best seen from a bike saddle or a café window. This is one of the world’s great cycling cities, flat and forgiving, laced with hundreds of kilometres of bike lanes and served by a free ferry behind Centraal that carries you across the IJ to the creative, industrial-chic sprawl of Amsterdam-Noord. The museums are unmissable — the Rijksmuseum, where you can watch Rembrandt’s Night Watch being restored in the open, and the Van Gogh Museum beside it — but the real city lives in its neighbourhoods: the narrow lanes and brown cafés of the Jordaan, the food stalls of De Pijp’s Albert Cuyp market, the Anne Frank House on a quiet canal. Come for the art and the canals; stay for the small, civilised pleasures — apple pie and coffee, a canal-side beer, a slow ride home as the bridges light up.

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