There are a huge number of museums to visit in Amsterdam. From historical to modern, from paintings to science and from tulips to canal houses, there is a museum about almost everything in Amsterdam
There are some wonderful historical museums in Amsterdam. The city's best-known and most visited museums are the Rijksmuseum, home (among other things) to masterpieces of seventeenth-century painting, and the Van Gogh Museum, which focuses on the life and work of Vincent van Gogh. If you want to learn more about Rembrandt van Rijn after visiting the Rijksmuseum, visit his former residence: Museum Rembrandthuis. At the Amsterdam Museum, dive into the history of the city of Amsterdam.
There are also fantastic museums in Amsterdam for lovers of modern art. In the Stedelijk Museum you can admire almost all major movements in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and design. The Moco Museum is an independent museum of modern and contemporary art and street art with branches in Barcelona and Amsterdam. The Cobra Museum focuses on the art and ideas of the Cobra movement.
A museum exhibiting both historical and modern art is the Hermitage. The museum was founded as an annex of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, but ties with Russia have since been cut.
World War II had a huge impact in Amsterdam. You can experience this in the museums in Amsterdam. Of the Jewish community, only 1 in 16 people survived the war. One of the most famous victims of the war is Anne Frank, who had to go into hiding just after her thirteenth birthday and kept a diary in which she wrote about her life and her dreams. In the Anne Frank House you can visit Het Achterhuis, the secret annex where Anne Frank was in hiding. In the Verzetsmuseum you will discover everything about World War II.
There's more to see in the museums in Amsterdam than just art. At the Scheepvaartmuseum you'll discover the maritime history of the Netherlands. You can even board the VOC ship Amsterdam. The NEMO Science Museum is a science and technology museum on the IJ, where visitors can immerse themselves in scientific phenomena. In the Tropenmuseum you will discover all about the different world cultures. Amsterdam's Hortus Botanicus is one of the oldest botanical gardens in the world, where as many as 4,000 species of plants from all over the world grow.
There are a number of fun museums in Amsterdam that are about typical Amsterdam things. For example, at the Amsterdam Tulip Museum you can learn all about tulips and at the Houseboat Museum you can see what it's like to live on a houseboat. At the Grachtenmuseum you'll discover all about the history of Amsterdam's canals. Would you like to see the inside of a beautiful stately canal house? Then visit Museum Van Loon, a museum in the former residence of Willem van Loon, who was one of the co-founders of the VOC in 1602. Or visit Huis Willet-Holthuysen, named after the couple who lived in the house in the late nineteenth century. In this house you can see how canal houses looked on the inside in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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