Vondelpark didn't get its name until 1867, when a statue of Golden Age poet Joost van den Vondel was installed and the park took his name. By then it had been open six years, laid out in the informal English landscape style Amsterdam's wealthier residents felt the city needed. Today it's the city's largest green space: rollerbladers practice tricks near the pavilion, bright lime-green parakeets gather noisily in the entrance trees, and Amsterdammers treat it as their living room.

The Renaissance-style pavilion dates from the late nineteenth century, once the haunt of Amsterdam's Bohemian set. A rose garden, an open-air theatre and a Picasso sculpture called The Fish add to its surprises.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tour uses Vondelpark as the heart of a walk through the Old West neighbourhood, connecting the park's poet namesake, its parakeet colony and architect Pierre Cuypers, whose fingerprints are on the Vondelchurch and the Rijksmuseum nearby.