The Prison Gate Museum

About this place

A castle gate that became a prison that became a museum: the Gevangenpoort was built around 1370 as the entrance to the palace of the Counts of Holland, then served as the court prison from the fifteenth century until 1828 — and its rooms and cells were left as they were, making it the most completely preserved medieval prison in the Netherlands. The guided tour (the only way in) walks the shared cells of the poor and the private rooms of the wealthy, who paid for comfort, the torture chamber with its original instruments, and the courtroom — explaining how the law distinguished between classes even in punishment. The most famous thing that happened here was not inside: in 1672 a mob stormed the gate, dragged out the De Witt brothers, leaders of the Republic, killed them and mutilated their bodies in front of it — one of the most violent scenes in Dutch history. It stands on the Buitenhof beside the Hofvijver lake, with the Mauritshuis steps away.