Amsterdam Events

Amsterdam’s calendar has one event that dwarfs everything else and a strong run of winter light and summer music.

King’s Day — 27 April

The monarch’s birthday, and the single most extraordinary day in the Dutch year. The entire country dresses in orange, and Amsterdam becomes something between a street party and a national car boot sale: on this one day anyone may sell anything on the street without a permit, so families lay out blankets of unwanted possessions and children busk for coins on the canal bridges. The canals fill with boats packed shoulder to shoulder, sound systems play from doorways, and the whole city is outside drinking from mid-morning. The night before, Koningsnacht, is its own event. Several hundred thousand extra people come in, the centre is closed to traffic, trains run all night, and accommodation is booked out many months ahead. It is chaotic, extremely good-humoured and unlike any other national holiday in Europe.

Amsterdam Light Festival — December to January

Commissioned light installations along the canals, seen best from a boat, through the darkest weeks of the year.

Pride — late July or early August

Uniquely, the parade is on the water: decorated boats along the Prinsengracht, watched from the banks by hundreds of thousands.

Sinterklaas — mid-November to 5 December

The saint arrives by steamboat in a televised national event and the weeks that follow are the real Dutch gift-giving season, with rhyming poems and marzipan. The blackface tradition attached to his helpers has been the subject of a long and bitter national argument and has largely been changed in Amsterdam.

Tulip season — late March to mid-May

Keukenhof and the bulb fields south-west of the city, a short train ride away.