Plantage is Amsterdam's most quietly elegant neighbourhood — wide, tree-lined streets laid out in the mid-19th century for a prosperous Jewish community, and now home to an improbable concentration of cultural institutions within a few minutes' walk of each other. Artis Zoo, the Hortus Botanicus, the Dutch Resistance Museum, and the Scheepvaartmuseum (Maritime Museum) are all here, alongside the Bimhuis jazz club and the Hermitage-turned-Rembrandthuis annex.
The Hortus Botanicus is one of the world's oldest botanical gardens — founded in 1638, originally as an herb garden for Amsterdam's physicians and pharmacists, and later expanded with specimens from the Dutch colonies in Africa and Asia. The palm greenhouse, a Victorian iron-and-glass structure, houses a cycad plant that is 300 years old. The garden is never crowded and is one of the most pleasant places in the city to spend an hour.
Artis, founded in 1838, is the oldest zoo in the Netherlands and has the compact, somewhat cramped feel of a Victorian-era city zoo — which is either charming or uncomfortable depending on how you feel about urban zoos. The Micropia museum within the zoo complex, exploring the world of microorganisms, is genuinely excellent and entirely unlike anything else in Amsterdam. The planetarium within Artis also remains one of the better in the Netherlands.
The neighbourhood's eastern edge runs along the Nieuwe Herengracht, one of the canals built in the 17th century specifically for Amsterdam's Jewish community. The Dutch Resistance Museum on Plantage Kerklaan documents the German occupation of 1940–45 with clarity and without sentimentality, and is among the best museums of its type in Europe.