Muiderpoort

Muiderpoort stands in Amsterdam where the former city edge met the old defensive line. This city gate presents a Louis XVI design with a raised centre, balustrade, and octagonal cupola. On the city side, Doric pilasters frame a recessed section beneath a pediment. The land side displays columns and Amsterdam’s newer coat of arms with three Saint Andrew’s crosses.

The present structure replaced an earlier gate that sank from its foundations and collapsed in 1769. Cornelis Rauws designed the replacement, completed in 1770 with sculpture by Anthonie Ziesenis. It once controlled every passage into Amsterdam. Tolls and salt taxes were collected beside a stone bridge with two wooden drawbridges. Traffic later moved around the gate after a neighbouring bridge opened in 1903. The small hamei from 1770 was rebuilt at Flevopark in 1938. The gate remains a national monument and Amsterdam’s only surviving seventeenth- or eighteenth-century gate in its original form.

Napoleon entered through it in a carriage drawn by eight white horses, beneath a temporary triumphal arch. Its name also belongs to a railway station about one kilometre southeast of the gate. The surrounding bridges cross the Plantage Muidergracht near Artis and the Singelgracht towards the Tropenmuseum.