Amsterdam’s Red Light District is a working neighborhood as well as a historic port-area quarter. Its story includes centuries of regulation and change, but the people who live and work here deserve privacy; the most respectful visit begins by treating the streets as public space shared with residents.
Quick facts
Amsterdam’s maritime museum records that in 1478 the city directed sex work into designated streets near Dam Square; those streets were not exactly today’s window district.
The national Dutch brothel ban ended in 2000, after which licensed sex businesses operated under municipal regulation.
The City of Amsterdam asks visitors not to stare at, photograph, or film sex workers; its mapped tour rules prohibit routes past sex workers’ windows in the Wallen area, rather than banning tours throughout the district.
Get directions to Red Light District. Confirm the visitor entrance and current access with the venue before travelling.
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Amsterdam’s Red Light District is known locally as De Wallen, “the walls,” for the medieval ramparts that once bordered this part of the old city. The district sits in the historic core around the Oude Kerk and the canals Oudezijds Voorburgwal and Oudezijds Achterburgwal. Its narrow lanes grew within a busy port town: sailors, merchants, residents, religious houses, and visitors all shared the same compact streets.
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Oude Kerk
Amsterdam’s oldest surviving building grew from a thirteenth-century chapel into a Gothic hall church shaped by port trades, religious change, and generations of burial. Its guild chapels, memorials, music, and contemporary art keep the city’s layered history present.
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Founded in 1987, Amsterdam’s Hash Marihuana & Hemp Museum traces cannabis through history, medicine, art and everyday culture. Its collection includes more than 9,000 objects, while the nearby Hemp Gallery explores industrial hemp’s long and varied uses.
De Waag
De Waag began as Amsterdam’s Sint Anthoniespoort, a fortified eastern gate built in 1488. After the city expanded, it became a public weighing house in 1617, with guild rooms above and an anatomical theatre added in 1691. Its clustered towers trace centuries of changing city life.
Nieuwmarkt
Nieuwmarkt grew around the Waag, a former city gate that became a public weighing house. The square’s changing uses—from trade to wartime persecution to modern protest—make it one of Amsterdam’s most layered public spaces.
Our Lord in the Attic Museum
A seventeenth-century Catholic church fills the joined upper floors of a canal house and two rear houses. Built by merchant Jan Hartman, it preserves the history of Amsterdam’s tolerated house churches and the community that worshipped here.
Dam Square
Dam Square grew from a dam across the Amstel and the civic space beside Amsterdam’s town hall. Once a waterside market, it now links the former town hall, today’s Royal Palace, with the National Monument, placing trade, authority, remembrance and protest in one busy public space.