Amsterdam’s Royal Palace began as the city’s monumental seventeenth-century town hall, built to project the authority of a wealthy mercantile city. Its Citizens’ Hall, marble maps, sculpture and galleries frame both that civic ambition and the global trade networks—and colonial exploitation—behind it.
Quick facts
Amsterdam’s town hall opened for use in 1655, although construction and decoration continued afterward.
Jacob van Campen designed the town hall that is now the Royal Palace Amsterdam.
Louis Bonaparte took Amsterdam’s town hall as his palace in 1808.
Get directions to Royal Palace Amsterdam. Confirm the visitor entrance and current access with the venue before travelling.
Audio guide
Listen to this place’s guide.
Guide
The Royal Palace Amsterdam began as the town hall of a powerful Dutch Republic city. That distinction matters: this was not built for a king, but for Amsterdam’s governing elite. Its monumental scale and decoration made a public claim about the city’s prosperity and political authority. It is now the Dutch king’s official reception palace, a state-owned building used for royal functions and opened to visitors when the calendar allows. It is not Amsterdam’s municipal hall today.
Continue exploring
Discover the full story
Keep reading with a travel pass and explore every full guide and tour.
UpgradeMore places in Amsterdam
Nieuwe Kerk
A “new” church for a growing Amsterdam, the Nieuwe Kerk stands on Dam Square beside the Royal Palace. Its Gothic history holds religious upheaval, a devastating fire, elaborate craft, royal investitures, and a tower ambition that remained unfinished.
Madame Tussauds Amsterdam
A wax-portrait attraction in a listed Dam Square department store. Opened in Amsterdam in 1970, it moved here in 1991; its present address stands where the square’s early twentieth-century retail expansion reshaped the city centre.
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.
Amsterdam Dungeon
Amsterdam Dungeon stages episodes of Dutch history with actors, sets and effects inside the Nieuwezijds Kapel, a protected church built on a much older religious site. The attraction’s theatrical scenes invite visitors to distinguish popular interpretation from the city’s archival and archaeological
Herengracht
Herengracht is one of Amsterdam’s principal seventeenth-century canals, where a carefully planned waterway became a prestigious address. Its Golden Bend gathers broad, double-plot mansions, but the canal’s quays also reveal the labor, trade and urban engineering behind that display.
Singel
Amsterdam’s Singel began as the medieval city’s defensive edge and became an inner working canal as the city expanded. Traces at Torensluis and in the quay stones reveal the walls, trade and everyday life once tied to its water.