Amsterdam in the Rain: 15 Things to Do on a Rainy Day
Last Updated on 01/10/2026 by Mayi
Amsterdam in the rain is still a good trip. The city is small, flat and densely packed with indoor places — a nine-floor public library you can sit in for free, four world-class museums within walking distance of each other, covered canal boats and more cafés than you could get through in a week. The one thing a rainy visit does demand is that you book the big attractions before you arrive.
My sister and I went in early March. It was the first time in Amsterdam for both of us, and we had an itinerary that assumed dry feet. It rained a lot — but what really broke the plan was the wind. Very windy. Umbrellas turned inside out, the kind of wind that makes a canal boat sound like a good idea at ten in the morning.
So this is a mix of two things: what we actually did when the weather pushed us indoors, and the places I would add if I were planning a rainy weekend there again. I have marked which is which, because I think that matters.
Short on time? Start with these five
- OBA public library — free, warm, open all day, and the best view over the city from a building nobody queues for.
- Rijksmuseum or Van Gogh Museum — book a timed slot the night before and you walk straight in.
- A covered canal cruise — an hour out of the weather that still counts as sightseeing.
- Café de Jaren — big windows, apple tart, nobody hurrying you out.
- Foodhallen — an indoor food hall for when you want lunch to last two hours.
Is Amsterdam worth visiting in the rain?
Yes — more than most European capitals, because the distances are short. The historic centre is roughly two kilometres across, so you are rarely more than a few minutes from a door you can go through. That is not true of a city like Rome or Madrid, where getting between sights in bad weather is half the problem.
What rain does take away is the thing most people come for: sitting on a canal bank, cycling, the Vondelpark, the Jordaan on a bright afternoon. You lose the loafing. You do not lose the city.
Honest trade-off: rainy days push everyone indoors at the same time. The museums and the Anne Frank House get busier, not quieter, when the forecast is bad. Booking ahead stops being optional.
1. Spend an afternoon in the OBA public library
We did this. Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam — everyone calls it the OBA — is the country’s largest public library, a few minutes’ walk from Centraal Station and, as it turned out, right by our hotel. We went in to get out of the rain and stayed most of the afternoon.
It runs over nine floors and feels much more like a modern art museum than a library — open, bright, almost no corridors. There are international newspapers and magazines alongside the Dutch ones, so you can read in your own language. The ground floor children’s section is one of the best I have seen anywhere. And there are soft corners all over the building where you can pull a travel book off a shelf and lose an hour.
There is a café-restaurant on the seventh floor with a panoramic view over the city — the view most visitors pay for at an observation deck, for the price of a coffee. The outdoor terrace only opens from April to October, but in winter the windows do the job perfectly well. It reminded me of the library in Birmingham, which is a compliment to both.
Practical: free to walk in, open seven days a week, no ticket, no booking — 8am to 10pm on weekdays, shorter hours at the weekend. If you only take one thing from this post, take this one.
2. Walk the canals anyway — with an umbrella
We did this. We came to Amsterdam to see Amsterdam, and grey skies do not take the architecture away. If anything the canals look better wet — the water goes dark, the lights come on early in the houses, and the reflections get sharper.
You do not need to walk to a particular spot. The centre is the attraction: leaning houses, houseboats with cats on the roof, bikes lashed three deep to a bridge railing, a tower appearing at the end of a canal. The grachtengordel — the ring of seventeenth-century canals that is a UNESCO site — is where most of this is, and it is all within half an hour’s walk.
Practical: buy the umbrella at home. Amsterdam umbrella prices on a wet day are their own small tourist tax, and a cheap one will not survive the wind off the IJ. A hood is more use than an umbrella when it is gusting.
If you want to see what the city looks like on a better day, I put the pictures in a separate Amsterdam photo diary.
3. Browse the Bloemenmarkt flower market
We did this. Tulips are the thing everyone associates with the Netherlands, and if you time a trip for mid-April you can go and stand in a field of them. We went in early March, which is too early, so the Bloemenmarkt was as close as we got.
It is a short run of stalls on the Singel, built out over the water, selling cut flowers, bulbs, seeds and a certain amount of souvenir tat. The stalls have roofs, which is the point here: you can walk the whole length of it without getting wet, and on a grey day the colour is worth the detour.
Honest trade-off: the Bloemenmarkt is twenty minutes, not an afternoon, and a fair share of the stalls now sell fridge magnets rather than flowers. Go because it is on your way to the Rijksmuseum, not instead of it.
Practical: if you are taking bulbs home, check they carry a phytosanitary certificate for your country — UK and US customs both care.
4. Book the Rijksmuseum
A suggestion — we ran out of dry days before we got here. The Rijksmuseum is the national museum and the obvious answer to a wet morning: Rembrandt’s Night Watch, a floor of Vermeers and Dutch Golden Age painting, and enough building to keep you occupied for three hours without going outside.
It sits on the Museumplein alongside the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk, so you can move between two of them in about four minutes of walking. On a bad-weather day that adjacency is the whole argument for basing yourself there.
Practical: book a timed slot online the night before. Walk-up tickets exist but the queue is outdoors, and standing in it is exactly what you are trying to avoid. Under-18s go free, which surprises people.
5. See the Van Gogh Museum
A suggestion. The Van Gogh Museum holds the largest collection of his work anywhere — around 200 paintings, hung so that you watch the style change year by year rather than wandering past masterpieces at random. Two hours is about right.
Practical: this one is online-only and timed. There is no ticket desk to queue at, so arriving hopefully does not work. Slots for weekends go first.
6. See modern art at Moco
A suggestion. If Golden Age painting is not what you came for, Moco is on the same square and runs to Banksy, Warhol, Dalí and a lot of immersive digital work. It is small — an hour, maybe ninety minutes — and it photographs well, which is not nothing when the light outside is flat grey.
Amsterdam has around 75 museums in total, and a cluster of them in the Museumkwartier. If you expect two or three rainy days, the I amsterdam City Card or the Museumkaart will usually pay for itself.
7. Visit the Rembrandt House Museum
A suggestion — we walked past it and photographed the banner, and I have regretted not going in ever since. The Rembrandt House Museum is the house he actually lived and worked in, furnished back to how it was, with his studio and printing press reconstructed upstairs.
It is a much smaller, quieter proposition than the Rijksmuseum — an hour rather than an afternoon — and it is in the centre rather than out at Museumplein, so it slots neatly into a day you are improvising around showers.
8. Book the Anne Frank House — weeks ahead
We tried and failed. We had not booked, so we joined the queue on Prinsengracht and stood in it until the rain came down hard enough to send us looking for somewhere warm. We never got in.
Important update: you cannot do what we did any more, for better or worse. The Anne Frank House now sells tickets online only, for a fixed time slot, with no tickets at the door at all. Slots are released in batches on Tuesdays at 10am Dutch time, six weeks in advance, and they go quickly. Tickets are personal and non-transferable, so you will need the names of everyone in your party.
There is one back door: around a fifth of each day’s tickets are held back and released online at 9am that same morning. They go in minutes, but if you are already in Amsterdam and the forecast has just turned, it is worth setting an alarm for.
In practice, though, the Anne Frank House is not a rainy-day fallback. It is the one thing you decide on before you book the flights.
9. Warm up with coffee and apple tart
We did this, repeatedly. Coffee is an institution in Amsterdam and nobody minds you sitting over one. We stopped at CoffeeCompany, which is the reliable local chain, and at Café de Jaren, which was the better call — a huge light room on the Amstel with a reading table of newspapers and a terrace you can look at longingly from inside.
Order appeltaart. Dutch apple tart is a different object from a British apple pie: tall, dense with chunks of apple, raisins and cinnamon, and served with a quantity of whipped cream that is not a suggestion.
Others worth the walk: Vegabond, Ivy & Bros and Lot Sixty One Coffee Roasters.
One point of vocabulary: a “coffee shop” in Amsterdam sells cannabis. The place that sells coffee is a koffiehuis or simply a café. Worth knowing before you walk into the wrong one with your mother.
10. Settle into a brown café
A suggestion — and the thing I would do differently. The bruin café is the Dutch answer to the British pub: small, dark, wood-panelled, walls stained brown by three centuries of smoke, sand on the floor in the old ones. They are built for bad weather in a way a modern coffee bar is not.
The ones people send you to are Café Hoppe on the Spui, Café Papeneiland on the Prinsengracht, and In ‘t Aepjen near Centraal, which occupies one of the two surviving timber houses in the city. Order a bitterballen — fried, molten in the middle, served with mustard — and stop looking at your watch.
We spent our wet hours in cafés with big windows. I think the brown cafés would have suited the weather better.
11. Take a covered canal cruise
We did this. With about 165 canals, a cruise is a reasonable thing to do in any weather, and in bad weather it is one of the few ways to keep sightseeing while sitting down. Ours was with Lovers and ran an hour. We got lucky — the rain stopped just before we boarded.
Honest trade-off: a covered boat keeps you dry, but in heavy rain the windows fog and you spend an hour looking at a blur. If it is properly pouring, go for an open boat with blankets or leave the cruise for the following morning.
Practical: Lovers, Blue Boat and Stromma all run from near Centraal Station and Damrak, so you can walk from the station to a boat in five minutes. Departures are frequent enough that booking on the day is usually fine.
12. Eat your way through Foodhallen
A suggestion — we talked ourselves out of it. Foodhallen is an indoor food hall in a converted tram depot in Oud-West: twenty-odd stalls under one roof, long shared tables, a bar in the middle. It is precisely the right shape for a wet afternoon, because you can arrive at two and leave at five without noticing.
On our last day we were in the Jordaan, cold, and faced with a fifteen-minute walk to get there. We did not fancy it. That was the wrong decision — fifteen minutes with a hood up buys you three hours indoors.
Practical: tram 17 from Centraal drops you a couple of minutes away, which solves the problem we had.
13. Shop the Nine Streets
A suggestion. De Negen Straatjes — the Nine Streets — is a grid of small cross-streets linking the main canals between the Jordaan and the Dam. Independent shops, vintage, bookshops, cheese, more cafés. The relevant detail for a rainy day is that the streets are short: you are never more than thirty seconds from the next doorway.
It is the one place in Amsterdam where shopping and sightseeing are genuinely the same activity, since you are walking the canal ring while you do it.
14. Browse Albert Cuyp Market
A suggestion. The Albert Cuypmarkt in De Pijp is the city’s biggest street market, running six days a week. The stalls have awnings rather than a roof, so this is a damp-day option rather than a downpour option — but it is where to eat a stroopwafel pressed fresh off the iron, which is worth a bit of drizzle.
De Pijp around it is full of small restaurants, so it works as a lunch plan with a market attached.
Practical: closed Sundays. Stalls start packing up around five.
15. Go up A’DAM Lookout — if the wind lets you
We planned this and had to abandon it. A’DAM Lookout is the observation deck on the tower across the IJ from Centraal, with a swing on the roof that hangs you out over the edge of the building. I had saved it for the last day because I knew my sister would love it.
We did not go. The wind and the cold made an open rooftop a bad idea, and the swing closes in high wind anyway. The ferry across to Noord is free and takes three minutes, so it is an easy thing to attempt — just check the forecast first, and treat it as the plan for your brightest half-day rather than your wettest.
Where to eat in Amsterdam on a rainy day
Oddly, on a short trip to the Netherlands we ended up eating almost entirely Italian. Amsterdam’s food scene is relentlessly international, so this is easier to do than you would think.
The first place was Vapiano, a pizza and pasta place next door to the OBA — convenient rather than memorable, but it was raining and it was there. On the last day, in the Jordaan, we found La Perla, which has two sites facing each other across the street. The pizzas were excellent, and I have this on the authority of my sister, a self-appointed pizza connoisseur.
If you would rather eat Dutch: bitterballen in a brown café, stamppot (mash with kale or sauerkraut, and a sausage) in winter, poffertjes from a stall, and herring from a haringhandel if you are braver than I am.
Where we stayed in Amsterdam
Amsterdam is not a cheap place to sleep. I had hotel points saved up with a couple of chains, so I spread them across two hotels and split the trip between them rather than paying full rate for either.
Holiday Inn Express City Hall came first. It is clean, simple and well placed for the museums, the staff were genuinely helpful, and it is the sensible economical choice rather than the exciting one.
The Park Plaza Victoria came second, and it is less than five minutes from Centraal Station — which, when you are coming back soaked at four in the afternoon, is the specification that matters. The building is handsome, the staff were excellent, and our room had the kind of mood lighting that makes a grey afternoon feel deliberate rather than disappointing.
Where to base yourself: for a rainy trip, stay near Centraal Station or the canal ring rather than out by Museumplein. Everything in this post is then within twenty minutes on foot, and the tram network fills the gaps.
How to get to Amsterdam
I travelled from London and took the train. Eurostar runs direct from London St Pancras to Amsterdam Centraal via Brussels and Rotterdam, and it puts you in the middle of the city rather than at an airport.
My sister came from Paris Gare du Nord. At the time that was a Thalys service; Thalys and Eurostar merged in October 2023, so the same journey is now simply booked as Eurostar.
Flying works too — Amsterdam Schiphol is about twenty minutes from Centraal Station by direct train, which is one of the better airport connections in Europe and genuinely useful when you land in the rain.
What to pack for rain in Amsterdam
The thing nobody warns you about is the wind. Amsterdam is at sea level with nothing between it and the North Sea, and an umbrella that works in London will be scrap by lunchtime.
- A hooded waterproof — more use than an umbrella on a windy day, and both is better than either.
- Waterproof shoes with grip. Canal-side cobbles and bridge ramps are slick when wet.
- Layers. You will go from a cold quayside into a heated museum four or five times a day.
- A dry bag or pouch for your phone — you will be taking it out constantly.
- A folding umbrella anyway, for the gaps between showers when the wind drops.
Amsterdam rainy day FAQs
Does it rain a lot in Amsterdam?
It rains often but rarely all day. Amsterdam averages around 130 rainy days a year, spread fairly evenly, which usually means showers and bright patches rather than continuous downpours. Autumn and winter are the wettest stretch; the wind is worse than the rain from November to March.
What is there to do in Amsterdam when it rains?
The best indoor options are the OBA public library, which is free and open all day, the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum on the Museumplein, the Moco and Rembrandt House museums, a covered canal cruise, the Foodhallen food hall and the brown cafés of the centre. The Bloemenmarkt and the Nine Streets both work as short covered walks between stops.
Can you still do a canal cruise in the rain?
Yes — most boats are covered and run in all but the worst weather. The catch is that the windows fog up in heavy rain, so you get the shelter but not much of the view. In persistent rain, an open boat with blankets is the better experience.
Do you need to book the Anne Frank House in advance?
Yes, and well in advance. Tickets are sold online only for a fixed time slot, with none available at the door. New slots are released on Tuesdays at 10am Dutch time for the week six weeks later, and in peak season they go within minutes. A further batch of same-day tickets is released at 9am each morning. Tickets are personal and non-transferable, so you need each visitor’s name.
Is a museum pass worth it for a rainy trip?
Usually, yes. If bad weather means you will see three or more museums, the Museumkaart or the I amsterdam City Card tends to cover its cost — and the City Card also includes public transport and a canal cruise, which is the combination you want when you are moving between indoor places all day.
When is the best time to see tulips in Amsterdam?
Mid-April is the reliable window for the fields and for Keukenhof, which opens roughly from late March to mid-May. We went in early March and were too early — the Bloemenmarkt had bulbs and cut flowers but there was nothing in bloom outside.
How many days do you need in Amsterdam?
Two full days covers the centre and two major museums comfortably. Three is better if the forecast is bad, because it gives you the slack to move an outdoor plan — a rooftop, a market, a long canal walk — to whichever half-day turns out brightest.
Final thoughts on Amsterdam in the rain
Our trip did not go to plan. We missed the Anne Frank House, we never got up the tower, and the one afternoon we had set aside for wandering was spent in a library instead. I would still go back in March.
What I would change is the booking. Everything we lost, we lost because we turned up hopeful — and in a city this small, the only real constraint on a wet day is whether you have a ticket for the place you are standing outside of. Book the museums, keep the rooftop and the market loose, and let the weather decide the order.
If you are planning a run of short European city breaks where the weather is a gamble, I have written up Ghent, Copenhagen and Stockholm too.
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That’s great post. I have similar about rainy days in Coron, Philippines haha. In every situation we can find a way to enjoy our trips!
True. Rainy days in the Philippines must be very intense! Would love to go there though.
Traveling with an umbrella and a backpack cover is essential. Not much you can do about the rain except get out and enjoy your destination.
Very true! I think I should consider investing in a good raincoat to have my hands free! Umbrellas are no use when it’s windy.