Dam Square

Dam Square is marked by a twenty-two-meter-tall white stone obelisk, known as the National Monument, which sits directly across from a massive palace. Around twelve seventy, settlers built a dam here across the Amstel River to manage flooding. This structure gave the city its name, and the open space around it became the center of Amsterdam. Today, the square is dominated by the Royal Palace, originally constructed as a city hall between sixteen forty-eight and sixteen sixty-five. The building rests on thirteen thousand six hundred fifty-nine wooden piles driven deep into the soft earth to support its weight.