Qualla: Amstelveen

Amstelveen: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Until 1964, this town was not even called Amstelveen. It was Nieuwer-Amstel, a sleepy unwalled village south of Amsterdam whose peat had run out and whose railway had never arrived. Then came the airport. Schiphol grew out of a demolished fort on the next polder over, KLM moved its head office onto Amstelveen soil, and a place that had nothing but cows and floriculture turned, within a generation, into the fastest-growing city in the Netherlands. It now has 95,996 residents, a Japanese supermarket, a museum dedicated to a post-war avant-garde, and a shopping centre that has been voted the best in the country three years running.

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Amstelveen: The Garden the City Built

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Walk south from the Amsterdamse Bos and you find yourself, almost without noticing, inside the Dr Jac. P. Thijssepark. Five hectares of curving paths, dark pools, and tangled native plants laid out so carefully that the careful work disappears. It was the first heempark in the Ne...

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Amstelveen: Royal Blue and the Big Four

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

KLM, the world's oldest continually operating airline under its original name, runs its global head office out of a 1970s slab on the Amstelveenseweg. The building is functional rather than glamorous, but the company has spent more than half a century trying to move out and faili...

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Amstelveen: The Cobra in the Stadshart

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The downtown, the Stadshart, has a museum that doesn't quite fit a leafy suburb. The Cobra Museum is named for the short-lived but explosive postwar movement of artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam: Karel Appel, Asger Jorn, Constant. Their paintings are loud, primitiv...

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Amstelveen: Cricket, Krokettenmotie, and a Future Prime Minister

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Amstelveen has had two strange moments of national attention. In 1999 it hosted a Cricket World Cup match between South Africa and Kenya, despite the Dutch not having qualified, because the VRA ground in Amstelveen was one of the few facilities ready for international play. In 19...

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Amstelveen: A Town That Chose Not to Disappear

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

After the Second World War, Amsterdam tried to absorb Amstelveen as a sort of green annex to the capital. Amstelveen pushed back. It stayed an independent municipality, used the postwar housing shortage to build deliberately attractive residential neighborhoods, and seeded them w...

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