Amsterdam has become the poster child for anti-tourism. But WorldPride revealed a city still willing to roll out the rainbow carpet for the right kind of visitor. Robbie Hodges reports.

Whether a card-carrying member of the queer community or not, you’re likely wondering what WorldPride actually means. And if you are, like me, a neurotic linguist: shouldn’t that be World Pride, not WorldPride?

So, before the gushing stream of salacious anecdotes from Amsterdam’s moment in the sun: a *brief* explainer. “WorldPride” is, in fact, a licensable IP allocated to one city every two years by InterPride, an organising body for Pride festivals worldwide. 

Host cities not only attract the attention of party-hungry queers the world over, but also academics and activists on the frontlines of queer civil rights, with an accompanying conference coming hot on the heels of the revelry. (For a sense of scale, NYC WorldPride in 2019 attracted an estimated five million visitors to the city’s roughly nine million residents.)

It’s interesting then, that Amsterdam, a city which has so famously led the charge against overtourism should play host to such a prolific tourist event. Who can forget “Stay Away”, 2023’s digital marketing campaign that virtually assaulted the hoards of British boozehounds seeking a wild weekender? More recently, the local council has capped the hotel and short-term rental market, and proposed a stratospheric 20% tourist tax (up from 12.5%). 

Sounds hostile? My welcome in Amsterdam was anything but – starting at the Eurostar Premier terminal in King’s Cross, where I was fast-tracked through security and into the Premier lounge where a pair of Pride cocktails awaited me. Eurostar had put its full cast of culinary tastemakers to work for WorldPride – topping off our four-course onboard dinner with a creamy, rainbow-lidded entremet from pastry chef Jessica Prealpato and keeping glasses gurgling with a rare sparkling pinot noir selected by chic sommelier du jour, Honey Spencer. 

 Save a momentary staff handover in Brussels, the bubbles didn’t stop for the full four-hour journey – doled out with a knowing smile by our mischievous server, Mae-Lin. Naturally, upon arriving at Sofitel Legend The Grand, it took a hot second to recognise the shoal of gold paillettes shimmering in the lobby as the legendary drag artist, Courtney Act. 

“You should have been here 10 minutes earlier,” cried the hotel’s sales and marketing director, Kees Hogetoorn, bereft, as Courtney graciously sashayed away with heels in hand. “We had all these drag artists – Conchita Wurst, Danny Beard – running through the lobby just now!” Quite the scene, I imagine. Then again, Sofitel Legend The Grand is something of a queer celebrity herself.

It was the first in the world to earn Booking.com’s Travel Proud badge – a queer-friendly accreditation that has since been rolled out to some 150,000-something hotels. As of WorldPride 2026, it’s also one of the first RITA (Report It Always) Safer Spaces in the city, offering a welcome haven to anyone in the vicinity who might have experienced assault. That’s not forgetting “Pride Cocktail”, the pre-parade party Kees launched 15 years ago, now an annual sell-out that sends a queue of around 600 partygoers winding around Amsterdam's canals.

All the best things in life are equal parts hedonistic and stonkingly beautiful; Sofitel Legend The Grand being no exception. It’s a formidable palimpsest of Amsterdam’s convoluted social history stretching all the way back to 1411. Variably, it’s been a convent (well, two, in fact), the seat of local government and a royal palace – or rather, “the court of the prince and men of high standing”. Nothing homoerotic to see here then. 

Inside, it drips with Queenliness. Up a flight of stone steps and past a wonderful Asiatic ironwork screen by sculptor Hildo Krop, magnificent rooms sit in quiet splendour. There’s the former mayor’s office padded with floor-to-ceiling green velvet, a psychedelic Marriage Chamber handpainted by 1920s artist Chris Lebeau, and a quintessentially Deco Council Chamber which was plucked by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands for her wedding in 1966. 

Back then, in Amsterdam’s swinging sixties, it wasn’t illegal to be homosexual, though the prospect that the city’s Royal Zoo might lead a tour in which volunteers enact homosexual elephant sex would have seemed a little whackadoodle, I’m sure. But it’s 2026, and so it was that, as the city slung rainbow flags across its streets on the eve of the parade, I found myself ogling swollen members of the animal kingdom on an iPad at ARTIS. 

Its “sexual diversity in the animal kingdom” tour has become a summer fixture at the zoo; an amusing but important reminder that sexual diversity isn’t a biological corruption caused by micro-plastics, but rather a timeless thread in the rich tapestry of life. Did you know, for instance, that if the dominant female in a clownfish group dies, the largest male simply changes sex?

Nor did many of the well-to-do homosexuals in attendance at Sofitel’s “Pride Cocktail” that evening. Part mixer, part status play, it was a who’s who of “the scene”. In one direction, upstanding gentlemen in shirt sleeves swigging rosé, London’s Deputy Mayor among them; on the stage, a cloud of rainbow plumage with arms, legs and other appendages, arranged by Aruba Tourism, one of the event sponsors; and elsewhere, off-duty drag artists and famous-looking figures hiding in obscure designer get-up. 

“We’ve been coming for almost 14 years,” one coiffed consultant at PwC Amsterdam told me as the crowd roared for the raffle. In the raffle’s disappointed diminuendo, I found myself shoulder to shoulder with a moustachioed soldier – not a Tom of Finland model, but the real thing – a frontline trooper from Ukraine who had spent two years in Russian captivity. “I heard from someone this is the place to be,” he said in halting English – proof, if needed, of the party’s legendary reputation. 

Breakfast the next morning was a sombre affair as figures sloped from one station to the other, gulping carrot, ginger and celeriac smoothie like prescription medicine and inhaling clouds of patisserie as if their existence depended on it. And well it might, for every sip up to that point had been nothing more than a pre-game. It was Saturday 1st of August: gays of all nationalities were adjusting their vests in hotel rooms from Zeeburg to Oud-West, and the official parade’s floats were assuming formation in the city’s backwaters, all 80 of them. 

Thankfully, it was but a 10-minute stumble from the hotel’s revolving doors to our seats on the VIP viewing platform – a luxury afforded us courtesy of Kees. With gourmet hot dogs and Heineken on tap, the five-hour parade everyone had been waiting for passed in a blur of flesh and sequins. 

One high ponytail after the next riffed her way past – now a Charli XCX cover, now Sia’s Titanium, and again. Behind them, evermore outlandish inflatables suckered and bounced their way through Amsterdam’s charming bridges, competing for whoops. The unofficial winner: Trump and Putin rendered as gargantuan Delftware kissing figures. As booties shook on the water, overhead, locals leaned out of their canalside windows, fluttering flags of support with their legs akimbo. 

Eventually, I too was akimbo (alone!), face down in the bundle of kneaded sourdough that was my Sofitel bedding. Over the course of the marathon party weekend, that hotel room became something of a rehabilitation centre – a cool respite from the high-summer heat, with a bathroom big enough to lie down in. Every departure was bittersweet. Still, the city cried out: “more!”

It was nine o’clock when I wrenched my body down to the hotel’s inner courtyard for a salubrious dinner under a canopy of light-strewn trees. At midnight, I bundled into an Uber with my comrades and set forth for a pulsating industrial warehouse far, far away from the genteel red bricks of The Legend and its somnolent canals. 

Club Raum, which clings to Amsterdam’s raw outer ringroad, has stealthily built its reputation on painstaking musical curation and an artfully designed space for dance and conversation that flows like hot honey – helped, no doubt, by the fudgy banana bread dished out at its on-site cafe until well after sunrise. 

Images by Sven Bijma 

Sofitel’s “Pride Cocktail” had provided a window onto the local queer scene’s ivory tower, but here we were snuffling around in its sweaty grassroots. Flip a quadrant in the smoking area and you’d find L, G, B, T and Q. Amid the swarms of bodies, I spoke to two women who lectured in political science; another guy who was on the Pride organising committee, his friend an aspiring actor. Each one a brief reprieve in a relentless relay of London’s finest queer techno DJs, hand-picked by the Adonis collective, who chewed us up and spat us out sometime after sunrise, still panting for more. 

But our time was up. Even WorldPride, for all its inexhaustible appetite, has to concede to morning eventually. As the train slid out of Amsterdam Centraal, basslines gave way to the gentle clink of cutlery, the healing promise of a quinoa salad and can upon can of full-fat coke in Eurostar Premier. After three days at full tilt, the usual indignities of modern air travel – schlepping to the airport, last-minute liquid calculations, janky boarding and on and on – might have been one too many.

The celebrations had been spectacular, yes, but they were also unmistakably Amsterdam: politically engaged, effortlessly stylish and just eccentric enough to remind you that progress is often best accompanied by a rabble-rousing party. And, thankfully, a palatial bed to crawl into and an exceptionally civilised means of escape.