I have visited hundreds of cities over the decades, but Amsterdam is the one place that I have returned to over and over. If you have been there, it’s probably one of your favorite cities too. And, if you haven’t visited yet, it’s probably on your top ten list of destinations. Either way, we’ve all seen wonderful films and videos set in the one of the world’s best travel destinations.

Amsterdam’s most memorable feature, its canals, were created not to look fetching on influencers’ socials, but in fact, as The Present Past host Jochem Boodt puts it in the video below, their construction was “a matter of life and death.” Too marshy for farming or home-building, the swampy ground beneath the city on the river Amstel had to be drained; when drained, it became subject to floods, which necessitated building dikes and a dam.

NB: if the video fails to load please click here.

That thirteenth-century engineering project of damming the Amstel protected the city, and also gave it its name. The Amstel itself is, in fact, a huge canal, and the rapid expansion of the settlement around it necessitated digging more and more auxiliary canals to assist with drainage, which defined the space for islands on which to build new districts atop hundreds of thousands of poles driven into the sea floor). As shown in the OBF video, this distinctive urban structure dictated the shapes of the city’s houses, with their universally narrow façades and their depths reflecting the wealth of the families within. Now, four centuries after it took its current shape — and having survived numerous crises inherent to its unusual situation and form — the center of Amsterdam is looked to as a paragon of urban planning, sometimes imitated, but without similarly “impossible” original conditions, never replicated.