Amsterdam’s stock exchange of 1602 still defines “modern”
Dam in the Amstel grew from a twelfth-century fishing village into a Dutch Golden Age world port. As of 1 January 2026 the city proper held about 941,873 people. The 1602 Amsterdam Stock Exchange is widely called the oldest modern securities market—and the city still ranks as an alpha world financial-cultural hub.
The ground was once soggy peat, so the city was founded later than other Low Countries towns. Farmers had lived along the prehistoric IJ and Amstel some three thousand years ago, and finds beneath the Damrak and Rokin include Bell Beaker pottery from 2200–2000 BC, but only a seasonal camp could survive until water was tamed. Permanent settlement came when the Amstel's mouth was dammed against floods, and the fishing village of the twelfth century became a world port in the seventeenth.
In that Golden Age Amsterdam led Europe in finance and trade and turned out secular art. Its 1602 stock exchange is often called the world's oldest modern securities market. Rembrandt worked here, and so for a time did the philosophers Spinoza, Locke, Descartes and Comenius; later residents included Van Gogh and the diarist Anne Frank. The ring of canals, now a UNESCO site, earned the nickname Venice of the North.
About 941,873 people lived in the city proper at the start of 2026, 1.46 million in the urban area and nearly 2.5 million in the metropolitan region, drawn from about 180 nationalities. Though it is the official capital, government and embassies sit in The Hague. Uber, Netflix and Tesla keep European bases here, the port ranks fourth in Europe, and Schiphol, KLM's hub, is the continent's third-busiest airport.
Visitors come for the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum, the Royal Palace on Dam Square, the Concertgebouw, the Anne Frank House and gabled canal houses, as well as nightlife and cannabis coffee shops. Bikes are central to daily life, and the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked it ninth among cities to live in for 2022.
Source: Amsterdam
