
Amsterdam · Street
Amsterdam Light Festival
Light installations along the canals, seen best from a boat in the freezing dark
Around twenty light works are installed along the canals and the Amstel each winter, commissioned from artists and designers and placed so that the route can be walked in about two hours or cruised in about seventy-five minutes. The water does the work: every piece is doubled in the reflection.
It runs through the darkest weeks of the Dutch year, which is the point, and it is the one time the canal ring is worth visiting in January.
Amsterdam
While you are in Amsterdam
MuseumBook aheadAmsterdam · Museumplein
Rijksmuseum
The Dutch Golden Age in a cathedral of a building, with a cycle path running through the middle
MuseumBook aheadAmsterdam · Museumplein
Van Gogh Museum
Two hundred paintings and five hundred drawings, kept together by the family and given to the state
Concert hallFree concertsAmsterdam · Museumplein
Royal Concertgebouw
A shoebox hall from 1888 that most conductors put in their top three in the world
Street
More street festivals
FebFreeVenice · Street
Carnevale di Venezia
Masks, a city that empties of cars because it never had any, and a flight down a rope into the piazza
AugFreeLondon · Street
Notting Hill Carnival
Europe's largest street festival, Caribbean in origin and entirely free
SepFreeBarcelona · Street
La Mercè
Barcelona's city festival: human towers, fire runs, giants and free concerts for four days