The street people mean when they search for Amsterdam’s tree tunnel is Lomanstraat, a residential street in the Willemspark quarter of Amsterdam-Zuid, just south of the Vondelpark. Two rows of century-old street trees lean in from either kerb until their trunks and branches cross overhead in rough X shapes, closing the road under a canopy. It is an ordinary public street: no gate, no ticket, no opening hours, and nothing to buy. The nearest trams run along the Amstelveenseweg side of the neighbourhood. The canopy is at its best from late September to early November, and at its most legible in winter, when the bare crossed trunks are fully exposed.
Lomanstraat tree tunnel at a glance
| What it is | A residential street whose two rows of street trees have grown together into a closed canopy |
| Where | Lomanstraat, Willemspark, Amsterdam-Zuid (approx. 52.3516, 4.8611) |
| Also called | The Lomanstraat tree tunnel, the green tunnel, the X trees |
| Cost | Free. It is a public street |
| Opening hours | None. Open at all times |
| Best months | Late September to early November for autumn colour; December to March for the bare crossed trunks |
| Best light | Two to three hours after sunrise, or the same before sunset |
| How long to allow | 10 to 30 minutes, depending on how much you photograph |
| Nearest trams | Tram 2, on the Amstelveenseweg side of the neighbourhood |
| Crowds | Low. It is a lived-in street, not an attraction, and there is nothing there to serve visitors |
Where exactly is Amsterdam’s tree tunnel?
Lomanstraat runs through the Willemspark neighbourhood in the borough of Amsterdam-Zuid, on the far side of the Vondelpark from the city centre. The City of Amsterdam draws Willemspark’s boundaries along the Amstelveenseweg, the Vondelpark, the Koninginneweg, the Emmastraat, the Noorder Amstelkanaal, the Hendrik Jacobszstraat and the Cornelis Krusemanstraat. Lomanstraat sits inside that block, running parallel to the Valeriusstraat.
That location matters more than it sounds, because it is where most guides send visitors wrong. This corner of Oud-Zuid is closer to the Amstelveenseweg than to the museum quarter, so the useful tram corridor is the western one, not the Beethovenstraat side.
| Getting there | Detail |
|---|---|
| Tram | Journey planners list Zeilstraat, Amstelveenseweg and Haarlemmermeerstation as the closest stops. All are on tram 2. Valeriusplein, also tram 2, is the nearest stop on the Vondelpark side |
| A stop to ignore | Gerrit van der Veenstraat, on trams 5 and 24, is a real stop but sits on the eastern side of Oud-Zuid, outside Willemspark. No journey planner lists it among Lomanstraat’s nearest stops |
| Paying for the tram | Tap in and out with a contactless bank card or phone. See our OVpay guide |
| On foot | From the Vondelpark’s southwestern end it is a short walk. Willemspark begins at the park boundary |
| By bike | The obvious way. The street has a cycle path running under the canopy, and it is an active route, not a viewing platform |
| By car | Do not. This is paid residential parking and the street is narrow |
The canopy is not uniform along the whole street. The crossing is tightest where the trees are largest and the buildings closest, so walk the length of it and turn around a few times rather than stopping at the first corner.
What kind of trees are they?
Nobody writing about this street agrees, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than picking one and sounding confident. The international travel press calls them London plane trees. A German city guide calls them honey locust. At least one listing calls them horse chestnut. These are three very different trees.
| Claimed species | Who says so | How you would know on the spot |
|---|---|---|
| London plane (Platanus x hispanica) | Far & Wide / AOL, World of Extraordinary, and Dutch tree writing describing the street’s platanen | Bark that flakes off in patches, leaving a cream-and-olive camouflage pattern. Big single leaves with pointed lobes. Bristly round seed balls hanging on stalks through winter |
| Honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos) | Mr. Amsterdam, a German-language Amsterdam guide | Dark, deeply ridged bark. Leaves made of many small leaflets in rows, so the shade is dappled rather than solid. Long flat brown pods on the ground in autumn |
| Horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) | One travel listing | Leaves like a hand, five to seven leaflets spreading from a single point. Conkers in spiky green cases in autumn. Fat sticky buds in winter |
You can settle it yourself in about a minute. The City of Amsterdam publishes a public map of every tree it manages, roughly 270,000 of them, searchable by street and showing the species of individual trees: maps.amsterdam.nl/bomen. The map covers trees in municipal care, which street trees are.
One caution on the search-engine answer. This street is discussed far more on social media than in reference sources, so a confident species claim often traces back to a single travel blog that in turn copied another. If you want the answer rather than the consensus, look at the bark.
Why do the trees lean and cross?
The mainstream explanation is that the trees grew that way on their own, reaching for light. Buildings four storeys high stand close on both sides, so the only reliable opening in the sky is the strip directly above the road. Over decades the crowns pushed toward it, the trunks followed, and the two rows eventually met in the middle. A tree specialist quoted in the 2026 coverage of the street gives that account, and adds that the trees have been checked and are structurally sound, with healthy root systems and no risk attached to the lean.
A second mechanism gets far less attention and is probably doing real work. Soil under a street is compacted by traffic, so the roots on the road side function poorly compared with the roots on the pavement side. A tree that is better anchored and better fed on one side, and better lit on the other, leans. That detail comes from a German guide to the street and is the only account that offers a below-ground reason rather than a purely above-ground one.
There is also a competing story that the arch was deliberate. In the early twentieth century, municipal gardeners in Dutch cities did sometimes train young street trees into shaped avenues, and by this account Lomanstraat was one of them, with the tunnel guided rather than accidental. The evidence for it is oral, passed down by residents, and the arch does look unusually even for something unplanned. Our page previously stated flatly that no human shaping was involved. That was more certain than the sources support, and it has been corrected here.
Did Nazi officers really save these trees?
This is the story that gets the street its clicks, and it needs handling carefully, because part of it is documented and part of it is not.
The documented part: during the Hongerwinter of 1944 to 1945, the German blockade cut food and fuel to the occupied western Netherlands. Gas and electricity failed, the winter was severe, and around twenty thousand people died. Amsterdammers burned whatever they could reach. Street trees, park trees, railway sleepers and the woodwork of emptied houses all went into stoves. Contemporary accounts describe whole avenues disappearing.
The undocumented part: the claim that Lomanstraat kept its trees because senior German officers lived on it, and nobody dared cut wood outside their doors. That circulates as neighbourhood oral history, most visibly in a Reddit thread that is currently the top search result for this street, and in the travel articles that picked the thread up. We have not found a primary source for it. It is a good story, and it may well be true, but no archive, memoir or city record we could find names Lomanstraat.
What is beyond dispute is that the occupation was administered from a few streets away. The Sicherheitsdienst and the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung, the office that organised the deportation of Amsterdam’s Jews, both worked out of two former school buildings on the Euterpestraat, in this same part of Oud-Zuid. On 18 May 1945 the city council renamed that street after Gerrit van der Veen, the sculptor and resistance fighter who was executed in 1944. The tram stop some guides tell you to use for Lomanstraat carries his name.
So the honest version is narrower than the viral one, and heavier: German security police really did run the occupation of Amsterdam from this district, and the street named for the man who resisted them is now a tram stop. Whether that presence is why these particular trees are still standing is unproven.
When is the best time to visit?
Late September to early November, if you want the gold, with October the safest single month to aim at. That window is what the other pages covering this street converge on, and it matches the way plane, locust and chestnut all colour in the Dutch lowlands. Outside it, the street is still worth the detour, but for different reasons.
| Season | What the canopy does | Worth going? |
|---|---|---|
| Spring (Mar to May) | New leaves fill in the branch lattice. The crossings are still visible through thin foliage | Yes, and it is the quietest time. Best compromise if you want to see the structure and the green at once |
| Summer (Jun to Aug) | Closed and solid. Deep shade, strong dappled light on the road | Yes for the tunnel effect, less so for the X shapes, which the leaves hide |
| Autumn (late Sep to early Nov) | Gold and bronze overhead, leaf litter underfoot, the branch structure re-emerging | The peak. Also the only time you will share the street with other photographers |
| Winter (Dec to Mar) | Bare. The crossed trunks and branches are fully exposed against the sky | Underrated. If you came for the X shapes rather than the colour, this is the season |
Autumn peak moves by a couple of weeks from year to year with the weather, so treat late September as the earliest edge rather than a date to book around. A weekday morning beats a weekend afternoon in any season.
Which neighbourhood is this, and who built it?
Lomanstraat is regularly credited to Plan Zuid, Hendrik Petrus Berlage’s expansion plan for southern Amsterdam. That attribution has spread through the recent travel coverage, and this page carried it too. It is wrong, and the correction is worth having, because it also fixes the dates.
| Willemspark (Lomanstraat) | Plan Zuid | |
|---|---|---|
| Planned by | J.G. van Niftrik, 1881, as a villa park around ponds continuing from the Vondelpark; laid out to a design by L.P. Zocher, who also designed the Vondelpark | Hendrik Petrus Berlage |
| Adopted | Built out from 1902, and named after King Willem III | Adopted by the city in 1917 |
| Housing | Mostly upper-floor apartments and townhouses built between 1906 and 1914 | Largely 1920s and 1930s, much of it Amsterdam School |
| Where | Between the Vondelpark and the Koninginneweg, west toward the Amstelveenseweg | The districts further south and east, beyond the Noorder Amstelkanaal |
The dates line up with the trees. If the flanking blocks went up between 1906 and 1914, then the street trees are of roughly that generation, which supports the “more than a century old” description, and it also explains the mechanism: the buildings had to exist before they could shade anything into leaning. A Plan Zuid street would be a decade or two younger.
Berlage and the Amsterdam School are still the right context for the wider south of the city, and Zuid is full of both. They are just not the story of this particular street.
How do you photograph it without getting the same shot as everyone else?
Stand in the middle of the road, point down the street, and the vanishing point does the work. That is also what nearly every photo of Lomanstraat looks like, which is worth knowing before you travel across the city for it.
- Go two to three hours after sunrise or before sunset. Low sun filtering through the canopy is the whole point, and midday flattens it.
- Walk the street twice and look back. From some positions the trunks read as knotted rather than crossed, which almost nobody shoots.
- Put a person or a passing cyclist in the frame. Without one, the trees lose their scale entirely.
- Shoot straight up. The lattice where the two rows interlock is the actual subject, and the street-level view buries it.
- Overcast is not a write-off in autumn. Flat light saturates the leaf colour and removes the hard shadows that wreck the road surface.
- Check behind you before standing in the road. The cycle path runs under the canopy and riders are moving.
Is it busy, and how should you behave?
It is not busy. Despite the street’s run on Instagram and TikTok under the tag #lomanstraat, and a wave of international coverage in 2025 and 2026, it stays a residential street with no visitor traffic to speak of. There is nothing there: no cafe, no bench, no sign, no bin. People mostly arrive by accident and stop.
Which is exactly the reason to be careful with it. These are front doors and ground-floor windows.
- Keep your voice down, especially early and late.
- Do not stand in doorways, and do not photograph into windows or at residents.
- Give way on the cycle path rather than making cyclists swerve around a tripod.
- Leave the trees alone. No climbing, no hanging off low branches, no tree guards as props.
- Take your litter with you. There is nowhere to put it.
On accessibility: the pavements are flat, paved and kerbed in the normal Amsterdam way, and the street is level throughout, so it is manageable with a wheelchair or a pushchair. There is no seating, no shelter and no public toilet anywhere on the street.
What else is nearby?
Lomanstraat takes ten minutes. It works as a detour rather than a destination, and everything below is walkable or one short tram ride away.
- Vondelpark begins at the neighbourhood boundary and is the obvious pairing. Our guide to Amsterdam’s best picnic spots covers where to sit and what the barbecue rules actually are.
- The museum quarter is a walk or a short tram east: the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum, the Stedelijk and the Concertgebouw.
- For quieter green space than the Vondelpark, Beatrixpark and Sarphatipark are both in Zuid and both far less trafficked.
- If crooked and leaning things are the reason you came, the crooked houses of Amsterdam are the built version of the same idea, and the canal guide covers the streets people usually mean when they ask which one is the prettiest.
- Amsterdam’s street trees hold more wildlife than they look like they should. Our guide to wildlife in Amsterdam covers what lives in them, including the parakeets you will hear before you see.
Frequently asked questions
Which street in Amsterdam has trees that form a natural tunnel?
Lomanstraat, in the Willemspark neighbourhood of Amsterdam-Zuid, just south of the Vondelpark. Two rows of century-old street trees lean in from opposite kerbs and cross overhead, closing the road under a canopy. It is a public street with no entry, no cost and no opening hours.
What type of trees are on Lomanstraat?
Sources disagree. Most English-language coverage says London plane (Platanus x hispanica); a German guide says honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos); one listing says horse chestnut. You can check on the spot from the bark, which flakes into cream patches on a plane and is dark and deeply ridged on a locust, or look the street up on the City of Amsterdam’s public tree map at maps.amsterdam.nl/bomen.
Were the trees shaped into an arch deliberately?
Unresolved. The standard explanation is that they leaned toward the only reliable light, the strip of sky above the road, over several decades, helped by compacted soil on the traffic side that weakens the road-facing roots. A competing account, passed down locally, says municipal gardeners trained the young trees into an avenue, as was sometimes done in the early 1900s. Both are plausible and neither is settled.
When is the best time of year to see the Lomanstraat tree tunnel?
Late September to early November for autumn colour. Winter, from roughly December to March, is better if you want to see the crossed trunks themselves, because the leaves are gone. For light, aim for two to three hours after sunrise or before sunset in any season.
Is Lomanstraat crowded?
No. It has a following on Instagram and TikTok and was covered internationally through 2025 and 2026, but it remains a residential street with no visitor infrastructure at all. Autumn weekend afternoons are the busiest it gets, and that still means a handful of people with cameras.
Did the trees survive the Second World War because Nazi officers lived there?
That is the popular story and it is unverified. Amsterdammers did cut down street and park trees for fuel during the Hunger Winter of 1944 to 1945, when gas and electricity failed and around twenty thousand people died. The specific claim that Lomanstraat was spared because German officers lived on it circulates as neighbourhood oral history, largely through a Reddit thread and the travel articles that repeated it, and we could not find a primary source. What is documented is that the Sicherheitsdienst ran the occupation from the nearby Euterpestraat, renamed Gerrit van der Veenstraat in May 1945.
Is Lomanstraat part of Berlage’s Plan Zuid?
No, although it is often described that way. Lomanstraat is in Willemspark, planned in 1881 by J.G. van Niftrik, laid out to a design by L.P. Zocher and built out from 1902, with most of its housing dating from 1906 to 1914. Berlage’s Plan Zuid was adopted in 1917 and shaped the districts further south and east.
How do I get to Lomanstraat by public transport?
Take tram 2. Journey planners list Zeilstraat, Amstelveenseweg and Haarlemmermeerstation as the nearest stops, with Valeriusplein closest on the Vondelpark side. Tap in and out with a contactless card or phone. The Gerrit van der Veenstraat stop on trams 5 and 24, which some guides recommend, is on the other side of Oud-Zuid.
Last updated: August 2026, and what was checked
This page was rewritten in August 2026. Four things on it were wrong or overstated, and have been changed:
- The neighbourhood and its dates. The page credited the street to Berlage’s Plan Zuid, adopted in 1917, and to Amsterdam School architects of the 1920s and 1930s. Lomanstraat is in Willemspark, planned by J.G. van Niftrik in 1881, designed by L.P. Zocher, built out from 1902 with housing dating from 1906 to 1914. The Plan Zuid attribution is a common error in the recent coverage of this street.
- The transport directions. The page sent visitors to the Gerrit van der Veenstraat stop on trams 5 and 24. That stop exists, but sits on the far side of Oud-Zuid; journey planners put Lomanstraat’s nearest stops on tram 2.
- The certainty about how the tunnel formed. The page stated that no deliberate shaping was involved. Sources are genuinely divided, and the page now says so and gives both accounts.
- The wartime story. The page presented the Nazi-officer explanation as settled local history. It is unverified oral history. The documented occupation history of this district, the Sicherheitsdienst offices on the Euterpestraat and the street’s renaming after Gerrit van der Veen on 18 May 1945, has been added in its place.
Two claims were dropped rather than corrected, because no source supports them: a figure for how many trees were left in Amsterdam after the war, and a count of households on the street. A superlative describing Lomanstraat as the city’s most photographed residential street was also removed, since nothing measures that.
The species question is deliberately left open. Three different trees are claimed by three different sources, and rather than pick the most popular one we have set out how to tell them apart and pointed at the city’s own tree register.
Checked against: the City of Amsterdam’s neighbourhood and monument documentation for Willemspark and the Vondelpark, the city’s public tree map, GVB and Dutch journey-planner stop data, Joods Monument and Amsterdam City Archives material on the Euterpestraat, and 2025 to 2026 travel coverage of the street.
