The canals of Amsterdam’s city centre will be included in UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites from next month. The UNESCO World Heritage Centre’s Deputy Director Kishore Rao announced the decision during the official designation as world heritage of the Wadden Sea, the area of tidal channels and mudflats off the northern Dutch coast.

Amsterdam has been working to win world heritage status for its 17th century centre since 2006. Locations on the list can obtain UNESCO funding for maintenance or to restore damage. But more significantly for Amsterdam, the world heritage tag is a source of prestige, and boosts the location’s status as a tourist destination.

The UNESCO World Heritage Site will take in the area around Amsterdam’s three main canals: the Herengracht or Patricians’ Canal, the Keizersgracht or Emperor’s Canal, and the Prinsengracht or Prince’s Canal. The three waterways run parallel to each other in a crescent shape, giving the city centre its characteristic semi-circular shape when viewed from the air. Many of the canal houses were built in the Golden Age, a period of great progress and prosperity in 17th-century Amsterdam.

Argument
Amsterdam’s application to UNESCO has not passed without argument over the past few months. The World Heritage Centre made a series of additional demands, some of which Amsterdam agreed to. A controversial plan to rebuild the 17th century Herring Packers’ Tower, demolished in 1829, was scrapped because UNESCO insists on authenticity on World Heritage sites. But Amsterdam turned down a UNESCO proposal to leave the Weesperstraat – a busy duel carriageway widely seen as the ugliest street in the city – outside the protected area. Even though the original buildings were flattened to widen the road in the 1950s and 1960s, the city council says much historic architecture still survives in the surrounding streets.

The Friends of Amsterdam City Centre Society (VVAB) has welcomed the World Heritage status. The society told Amsterdam-based daily Het Parool it hopes more tourists will now be attracted by Amsterdam’s culture and museums instead of its soft-drug coffeeshops and red light district. But there are those who oppose the move, such as publicist Rogier van Kralingen, who fears the protected status could turn the city into a lifeless museum. “The UNESCO way of thinking is at odds with the plans to make Amsterdam into a creative metropolis,” he says.

Windmills
Amsterdam city centre will be the ninth Dutch site to make the World Heritage list, which also includes the modernist Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht, the windmills of Kinderdijk-Elshout and, on the other side of the Atlantic, the old town of Willemstad, on the island of Curaçao in the Netherlands Antilles.