Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands, a city of 941,873 people (1 January 2026) in the province of North Holland, built where the Amstel river meets the IJ. It is the country's largest city and the constitutional capital, although the cabinet, the parliament and most foreign embassies are in The Hague. What defines Amsterdam more than any single building is the people who came to it: Flemish refugees, Portuguese Jews, French Huguenots, German labourers, and after 1945 Indonesians, Surinamese, Turks and Moroccans. Today about half of the city's residents are of immigrant origin, and some 180 nationalities are represented.
Amestelledamme in 1275: Toll-Free Traders at the Dam
The first Amsterdammers were not farmers. Upstream, around Ouderkerk aan de Amstel and Amstelveen, peasants had been reclaiming wet peatland for two centuries, but the settlement at the river mouth grew up after the All Saints' Flood of 1170 turned the shallow IJ into a wide estuary with an open channel to the Zuiderzee. From the start the people there lived from traffic, production and trade. A dam across the Amstel was probably built between 1264 and 1275, and in 1275 Count Floris V of Holland granted the residents "apud Amestelledamme", at the dam in the Amstel, freedom from tolls at the bridges, locks and dams of his county.
That privilege set the pattern for the town's population. Around 1300 Amsterdam had only about 1,000 inhabitants, but while many Holland towns shrank in the 15th and 16th centuries, it kept growing on the Baltic grain trade, especially after the Burgundian victory in the Dutch–Hanseatic War of 1441. Even so, its population stayed modest next to the towns of Flanders and Brabant, then the most urbanised part of the Low Countries.
Flemings, Huguenots and Westphalians After the Fall of Antwerp
The Dutch Revolt changed that. Largely Catholic Amsterdam joined the rising against Spanish rule only in 1578, later than most northern cities, but when Antwerp fell to Spanish forces in 1585, merchants, printers and religious refugees from the Southern Netherlands streamed north. Amsterdam's population more than doubled between 1585 and 1610 and reached about 50,000 by 1600. The influx of Flemish printers, together with the city's intellectual tolerance, made Amsterdam a centre of Europe's free press.
The newcomers kept arriving. The canal ring, the Grachtengordel of Herengracht, Keizersgracht and Prinsengracht, was planned in the early 17th century, when immigration was at a peak, and construction began in 1613. After Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes with the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685, French Protestant Huguenots came in large numbers. As Calvinists they folded easily into the Dutch Reformed Church, but some congregations, known as Walloon churches, still hold occasional services in French. Westphalians from across the German border came mostly for work, and their migration continued through the 18th and 19th centuries.
English speakers left a mark too. The English Reformed Church in the Begijnhof, the medieval courtyard off the Spui, holds the oldest English-language congregation anywhere outside the United Kingdom, and services are still given there in English under the Church of Scotland. By the 1660s the city had about 200,000 residents, and in 1750 it was the fourth-largest city in Western Europe after London, Paris and Naples, even though it was not the seat of government of the Dutch Republic.
The Jerusalem of the West: Sephardim, Ashkenazim and Mokum
No community shaped the city's reputation for tolerance more than its Jews. The first were Portuguese: descendants of Jews forced to convert in Spain after the Alhambra Decree of 1492 and in Portugal after 1497, some of whom had kept practising Judaism in secret. In 1593 a group of these conversos, turned away by Middelburg and Haarlem, settled in Amsterdam. They called themselves the "Hebrew Nation", were allowed to practise their religion openly from 1603, and consecrated their first synagogue in 1639. They helped build Amsterdam into an international trading hub, with connections to the Levant, Morocco and the Caribbean, and during the Golden Age their community was one of the largest and richest Jewish communities in Europe.
The philosopher Baruch Spinoza was born into this community in 1632, the son of a prominent merchant whose family had fled Portugal. His questioning of rabbinic authority led to his permanent expulsion from the congregation in 1656, but he stayed in the Dutch Republic and became one of the central figures of early modern philosophy.
In 1675 the Sephardim completed the Portuguese Synagogue, the Esnoga, a building so large and so lavish that Christian visitors came from other countries to see it. It is still an active place of worship, and the name Esnoga is simply the Judaeo-Spanish word for synagogue.
In the second half of the 17th century a second wave arrived: Ashkenazi Jews from Central and Eastern Europe, many of them refugees from the Thirty Years' War and the Khmelnytsky uprising in Ukraine. They built their own synagogues and settled mostly in the old eastern core around Jodenbreestraat, Waterlooplein and the Nieuwmarkt. Their Yiddish seeped into the local Dutch dialect, and one word stuck to the whole city. Mokum, from the Hebrew makom, "place", became Amsterdam's nickname; once counted as street slang, it is now used with affection by Amsterdammers themselves. Jews in turn called the city the "Jerusalem of the West".
VOC Shareholders, the 1609 Bank and the Slave Ships
The merchants who poured in from Antwerp and Iberia turned Amsterdam into the richest city in the Western world during the 17th century. Its traders held the largest share of both the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the Dutch West India Company, and ships left its harbour for the Baltic, the Caribbean, North America, West Africa, Brazil, India, Sri Lanka and what is now Indonesia. In 1602 the Amsterdam chamber of the VOC began trading its own shares, creating what is usually described as the world's first stock exchange, and the Bank of Amsterdam opened in 1609, serving Dutch merchant bankers and acting as a reserve bank.
That network also carried people against their will. From the 17th century Amsterdam was a major destination port for Dutch slave ships in the triangular trade between Europe, Africa and the Americas, a trade that lasted until the Netherlands abolished its involvement in 1814 at British request. The colony that tied Amsterdam most closely to that history was Suriname, held by the Dutch from 1667 to 1975, and it would later send one of the city's largest communities.
Religious life stayed tightly controlled even as trade boomed. After 1578 Catholic priests were expelled, every church became Protestant, and Catholics, dissenting Protestants and some Jews worshipped in hidden churches built inside ordinary houses. The Catholic hierarchy was restored only in 1853, after which the architect Pierre Cuypers designed not just churches but also Amsterdam Centraal station and the Rijksmuseum. In 1900 about 45% of residents belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church and 25% were Catholic.
1941 to 1945: The February Strike and the Destruction of Jewish Amsterdam
Before the Second World War roughly one Amsterdammer in ten was Jewish, about 79,000 people. The German occupation from May 1940 brought exclusion from public posts, then raids and arrests in the Jewish quarter. On 25 February 1941 the outlawed Communist Party called a general strike in protest; by the next day some 300,000 people had joined, and it is regarded as the first public protest against the Nazis anywhere in occupied Europe. The Germans suppressed it harshly, and by 27 February it had mostly dissipated.
Deportations followed. The Nazis murdered more than 80% of the city's Jews, and among the deported was Anne Frank, whose family's hiding place above the Opekta offices on the Prinsengracht was raided by German police on 4 August 1944. The old Jewish neighbourhood decayed after the war, and when the city began demolishing part of it for the metro, the Nieuwmarkt riots of 24 March and 8 April 1975 led the authorities to abandon plans for large-scale redevelopment, and the area was rebuilt on its original layout. Today Amsterdam's Jewish community numbers roughly 15,000.
Indonesians, Surinamese, Turks and Moroccans After 1945
The post-war city was remade by migration from the former empire and around the Mediterranean. The first large group came from Indonesia after the independence of the Dutch East Indies in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s guest workers arrived from Turkey, Morocco, Italy and Spain. When Suriname became independent in 1975, a large wave of Surinamese people, who had to choose between Surinamese and Dutch citizenship, settled in the city, most of them in the Bijlmer in the southeast. The Netherlands as a whole now has about 365,000 people of Surinamese descent, the largest Caribbean community in Europe.
The Bijlmermeer had been a lake drained for farmland in the 1620s. In the 1960s a team led by the architect Siegfried Nassuth designed a new district there as a single modernist project, with near-identical high-rise blocks arranged on a hexagonal grid, and a metro line reached it in 1977. Many of its middle-class residents moved out, and with housing short after 1975 the Bijlmer became home to thousands of Surinamese newcomers and later to Ghanaian families. Its annual Kwaku Summer Festival still mixes Surinamese, Antillean and African food and music. Ghanaian congregations founded African churches there, often in converted parking garages.
The same outflow reshaped the city's population curve. Amsterdam peaked at 872,000 residents in 1959, lost as many as 25,000 people in a single year in 1973, and was down to 675,570 by 1985. Young professionals and artists moved into emptied inner districts such as De Pijp and the Jordaan, and from the 2010s growth returned, much of it through immigration.
Today about half of the city's residents have a migration background, yet 88% hold Dutch citizenship. In 2006 people of non-Western origin were about one-fifth of the population and more than 30% of its children, and by 2023 people with two Dutch-born parents were a minority in 40% of Amsterdam's neighbourhoods. Islam is the largest non-Christian religion, at about 7.1% of residents in 2015, and Hinduism arrived with the Surinamese. For how this diverse city fits alongside Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht, see our guide to the largest cities in the Netherlands; for the waterways the 17th-century newcomers paid for, our piece on Amsterdam's canals traces their layout; and for why the capital does not host the cabinet or parliament, see how the government of the Netherlands is organised; since the 1983 revision the constitution names "the capital Amsterdam" only as the place where each new monarch is sworn in.
Quick Facts About Amsterdam
- Country: Netherlands
- Continent: Europe (Western Europe)
- Country population: approximately 18.4 million
- Capital city status: Amsterdam is the capital of Netherlands, the seat of national government, and the location of foreign embassies, parliament, and the head of state's official residence.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the capital of Netherlands?
The capital of Netherlands is Amsterdam. Amsterdam is the seat of national government, hosts most foreign embassies and consulates, and is typically where the head of state and parliament are located.
What continent is Amsterdam in?
Amsterdam, the capital of Netherlands, is located in Europe, in the Western Europe region. As Netherlands's capital, Amsterdam serves as the country's primary connection to the broader Europen political, economic, and cultural sphere.
Why is Amsterdam the capital of Netherlands?
Amsterdam was chosen as the capital of Netherlands for reasons that typically combine geography, history, and politics. Capital city selections often reflect a desire for centrality (being accessible from across the country), historical importance (being a longstanding seat of government or culture), or neutrality (being acceptable to multiple regions or ethnic groups within the country). The specific reasons for Amsterdam's designation are detailed in the city's history above.
What is Amsterdam known for?
As the capital of Netherlands, Amsterdam is best known for housing the country's central government institutions — parliament, presidential or royal residences, supreme court, and key ministries. It is also typically a major cultural and economic center within Netherlands, hosting national museums, embassies, and signature monuments. The introduction and history sections above provide detailed coverage of the city's specific notable institutions and landmarks.
Related Pages
- Netherlands Country Guide — full geography, climate, economy, and culture overview
- Flag of Netherlands — meaning, history, and design of Netherlands's national flag