Country
The Netherlands is a country partly reclaimed from the waters of the North Sea, and around half of it lies at or below sea level. Land reclamation has been the dominant motif of its history, the result a country of resonant and unique images - flat, fertile landscapes
punctured by windmills and church spires; ornately gabled terraces flanking peaceful canals; and mile upon mile of grassy dunes, backing onto stretches of pristine sandy beach.
A leading colonial power, its mercantile fleets once challenged the best in the world for supremacy, and the country enjoyed a so-called "Golden Age" of prosperity in the seventeenth century. These days, the Netherlands is one of the most developed countries in the
world, with the highest population density in Europe, its sixteen million or so inhabitants (most of whom speak English) concentrated into an area about the size of southern England.
Most people travel only to the uniquely atmospheric capital, Amsterdam : the rest of the country, despite its accessibility, is comparatively untouched by tourism. The west of the country is the most populated and most historically interesting region - unrelentingly
flat territory, much of it reclaimed, that is home to a grouping of towns known collectively as the Randstad (literally "rim town"). It's a good idea to forsake Amsterdam for a day or two and investigate places like Haarlem , Leiden and Delft
with their old canal-girded centres, the gritty port city of Rotterdam , or The Hague , stately home of the government and the Dutch royals. Outside the Randstad, life moves more slowly. The province of Zeeland , in the southwest, is the country at its most
remote, its inhabitants a sturdy, distant people, busy with farming and fishing and hardly connected to the mainland. In the north, Groningen is a busy cultural centre, lent verve by its large resident student population. To the south, around the town of Arnhem ,
the landscape undulates into heathy moorland, best experienced in the Hoge Veluwe national park. Further south still lies the compelling city of Maastricht , squeezed between the German and Belgian borders.
Amsterdam
AMSTERDAM is a beguiling capital, a compact mix of the provincial and the cosmopolitan. It has a welcoming attitude towards visitors and a uniquely youthful orientation. For many, however, its world-class museums and galleries - notably the Rijksmuseum, with its
collection of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, and the Van Gogh Museum - are reason enough to visit.
Amsterdam was founded on a dam on the river Amstel in the thirteenth century. During the Reformation it rose in stature, taking trade away from Antwerp and becoming a haven for its religious refugees. Having shaken off the yoke of the Spanish, the city went from strength to
strength in the seventeenth century, becoming the centre of a vast trading empire with colonies in Southeast Asia. Amsterdam accommodated its expansion with the cobweb of canals that gives the city its distinctive and elegant shape today. Come the eighteenth century, Amsterdam
went into gentle decline, re-emerging as a fashionable focus for the alternative movements of the 1960s. Despite a backlash in the 1980s, the city still takes a uniquely progressive approach to social issues and culture, with a buzz of open-air summer events, intimate clubs and
bars, and relaxed attitude to soft drugs |
