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Magnificent and quite unexpected, concealed behind an unexceptional façade, A L van Gendt’s Hollandsche Manege is a vast Neo-Classical indoor riding school, built in 1881. (It was commissioned to replace the original Dutch Riding School building, which was situated on Leidsegracht.) Based on the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, it sports elegant plasterwork, sculpted horses’ heads, and a stunning open ironwork roof rising high above the sand arena. The school was threatened with demolition in the 1980s, but public outcry saved it. If there is a lesson in progress, you can stay and watch. There is also a café.

Stylish 19th-century royal riding school (see Hollandsche Manege).

One of the more unusual places to stop for a drink in town. The upstairs café of this stables overlooks the sand arena below as classes are being held.

During the Nazi occupation, this former theatre was used as an assembly-point for thousands of Jews. Behind an intact façade, a garden has been created around a basalt monument on the site of the auditorium. The names of 6,700 Dutch Jews are engraved in a memorial hall to the 104,000 who were exterminated. There is an exhibition upstairs.

Jewish families were rounded up at this operetta theatre before being transported to the death camps. A moving memorial and a small exhibition of memorabilia keep their memory alive (see Hollandsche Schouwburg).

Open since 1670, this historic brown café, with its lefty past and church pews, was a regular haunt of radical journalists, writers and intellectuals in the Provo-fuelled 1960s.

The dark wooden interior and tang of cigar smoke in the air are the very essence of the classic “brown café”. Pink-faced old men enjoying one too manyjenevers , smart young professionals on the way home from work, friends meeting up for beer and a gossip, populate this cheery Amsterdam institution (see Hoppe).

A wild and verdant place dotted with tropical palmhouses and welcome benches, the small botanical garden on the east side of the city dates back to 1682, when an apothecary’s herb garden was established here (see Hortus Botanicus).

About 8,000 different species of plants, flowers and trees, an ornamental pond, rock and herb gardens, and numerous glasshouses are crammed into this small, wedge-shaped botanical garden. Most of the exotic plants were collected by the VOC in the 17th and 18th centuries. Highlights are a 300-year old Cycad palm, the three-climates glasshouse and a coffee plant, Europe’s first, smuggled out of Ethiopia in 1706.