Most visitors to Amsterdam will find their way to the city’s most famous art museums, the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum, along with sites of particular historic interest like the Anne Frank House. But Amsterdam also has dozens of other excellent, sometimes offbeat museums that are worth discovering. Here are five favorites.

Het Scheepvaartmuseum

Occupying the former waterside premises of the Dutch Admiralty Arsenal, which supplied ships during Holland’s Golden Age, Het Scheepvaartmuseum (the National Maritime Museum) displays maps, globes and navigational instruments, as well as intricate models of ships. Moored in front of the museum, a reproduction 18th-century Dutch East Indiaman offers an intriguing glimpse of what life was like on the sailing vessels that voyaged from Dutch ports to destinations as distant as Brazil and the Dutch colony of Batavia, today’s city of Jakarta.

Het Scheepvaartmuseum
Kattenburgerplein 1. Tel. (31) 20-523-2222