The Vondel Statue: The Poet Who Named the Park
Why is it significant?
Follow the path into the trees and feel the city drop away behind you. The traffic fades, the air smells of cut grass and wet leaves, cyclists glide past, and ahead, on a tall stone pedestal among the flowerbeds, a bronze poet watches over it all.
Key Facts
| Place | The Vondel Statue: The Poet Who Named the Park |
|---|---|
| Address | Vondelpark, 1071 AA Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.36000, 4.87400 |
| Part of Walk | Amsterdam's Green Heart: Vondelpark, Oud-Zuid and the Concertgebouw |
| Generated | Generated |
Follow the path into the trees and feel the city drop away behind you. The traffic fades, the air smells of cut grass and wet leaves, cyclists glide past, and ahead, on a tall stone pedestal among the flowerbeds, a bronze poet watches over it all.
This park was not a royal gift and not a city project. In 1864 a group of wealthy Amsterdammers, worried that their crowded city had nowhere decent to walk or ride, formed an association, bought soggy meadowland outside the moat, and hired the landscape architect Jan David Zocher, later helped by his son. They designed it in the English style, with winding paths, ponds and long views, and the first part opened in 1865 simply as the New Park.
Two years later, in 1867, this statue by Louis Royer arrived, and people began calling the place Vondel's park. The name stuck. Joost van den Vondel, born in Cologne in 1587, ran a silk shop in Amsterdam and wrote the greatest plays of the Dutch Golden Age. His drama Gijsbrecht van Aemstel was performed in Amsterdam almost every New Year for more than three hundred years.
Fame did not make him rich. His son's debts ruined the family, and at nearly seventy the most celebrated poet in the country had to take a job as a clerk at the city pawn bank, where he worked for about ten years. He died in 1679 at the age of ninety-one, and the park that carries his name was only laid out almost two centuries later.
And the park has a secret: it is sinking. It was dug out of peat, a soft, spongy soil, and ever since the first lawns were sown the ground has been settling. Parts of it lie below the streets around it, and it has had to be raised and drained again and again just to keep your feet dry. Now follow the paths south-west to the big pond, where the park's wildest residents are waiting.