5 weird Amsterdam museums devoted to cats, marijuana, pipes, torture and houseboats

Publish date: 2024-03-25

Some tools are recognisable, such as the stocks: a wooden frame in which a person’s head and arms would be locked, to expose them to public humiliation. Others are sickening, designed to inflict extreme physical and psychological pain, such as the rack with a wooden board to which the victim would be attached by chains. The chains would be slowly winched to stretch the victim’s limbs then dislocate them.

This is not a museum to enter on a whim, but it does open a window onto the worst extremes of human behaviour.

Adult tickets to the Torture Museum cost €9.50 (US$10.30). Tickets for children under 12 are €5, but would you really want to expose someone so young to such horror?

2. Cat Cabinet

This museum is exactly as advertised. Sculptures, paintings, posters, books, photos, lithographs, signage, advertisements, playbills, ceramics – all of them depicting cats.

Housed inside a 17th-century mansion overlooking a serene canal in Amsterdam, the quirky, photogenic Cat Cabinet museum contains more than 1,000 items that celebrate felines.

This charming museum was created to honour the late John Pierpont Morgan; not the wealthy businessman, but a red cat. There was, though, a wealthy fellow involved: Bob Meijer, who owned and so adored the animal that he opened this museum in his honour in 1990.

John Pierpont Morgan’s image can be seen throughout the museum, including on fake American currency on which his owner had the cat’s head printed.

Adult tickets cost €10.

3. Amsterdam Pipe Museum

A man with a hunched back leans forward with his right hand resting against his chin. It is only on closer inspection that I realise this ceramic item is not a sculpture but a pipe.

There are further surprises throughout the Amsterdam Pipe Museum, which has amassed a collection of more than 35,000 smoking utensils since opening in 1995. At any time, there are more than 1,000 on display inside glass cabinets. Many are artworks, displaying intricate craftsmanship.

Some are 2,500 years old, such as the museum’s array of tubular pipes from Ecuador. Originating from the Jama-Coaque culture, these ceramic pipes are shaped to represent mythological lion-like beasts.

Adult tickets to the Amsterdam Pipe Museum cost €12.50.

4. Houseboat Museum Amsterdam

It’s not surprising, in a city of canals, to find a museum devoted to boats of some description, but this is not the National Maritime Museum (which is itself worth a few hours of your time).

With the Dutch being generally tall, many of those who visit must, like me, have to bend their head to one side for most of the time spent inside this old houseboat that bobs on a canal in central Amsterdam.

Twenty-three metres (75 feet) long and 4.5 metres wide, this vessel has 80 square metres (860 square feet) of living space, but has been turned into a museum to allow visitors to see, feel and smell what it’s like to live inside a small vessel docked in a city.

Amsterdam is home to more than 2,000 floating residences such as this, which are connected to utilities and sewers. Houseboats originated in the Netherlands in the 1800s but boomed in popularity in the 1970s as Dutch cities became more crowded.

Adult tickets cost €5.

5. Hash, Marijuana and Hemp Museum

No city in the world is more intrinsically linked to the cannabis plant and its mind-altering products than Amsterdam.

Marijuana tourism is booming, with travellers now able to legally buy marijuana everywhere from Thailand to Canada, Jamaica, Barcelona and several US states. But Amsterdam remains the original and best-known weed-tourism destination.

Foreigners have been buying and smoking cannabis in its coffee shops since the mid-1970s, which also helps explain the ubiquity of sweet shops in the city (for the munchies).

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This museum unravels the history of marijuana both globally and in the Netherlands through its collection of more than 9,000 exhibits, which include bongs and pipes, posters, paintings, advertisements, and hemp textiles sourced from around the planet.

The museum traces the quest for highs back 3,000 years, to Laos, where archaeologists have discovered pipes believed to have been used to smoke cannabis.

Entry costs €9. Free entry for children under 12, although you may have a bit of explaining to do.