Other than seeing the Wadden Sea, the primary mission of my self-directed northern adventure was to visit the rest of the Netherlands' World Heritage sites. All five (including the Wadden Sea) are variations on the same theme: how the Dutch fought the Sea. The five sites were, collectively, rather anti-climatic. (Spoiler alert: the Dutch won.)
But in the right order, they do tell the arch of the defining Dutch story. It goes something like this:
In the beginning, there was land, and there was Sea. And then the Sea breached the land, and the land was flooded. This was understandably frustrating to the people who thought they lived there. (The Wadden Sea will remain permanently stuck in this stage of the story, now that it is protected as a World Heritage site. But no one really wants to live that far north anyway.)
At first the people tried to fight the Sea by building their houses and churches on terps (mounds of earth) and constructing sea walls and sand bars. This was not very successful. Eventually the ingenuous Dutch realized they could use windmills to pump water up and out of low-lying land.
Thus the polders were born: land drained and kept dry by orderly systems of dikes and windmills. The very first, Beemster Polder, was drained in 1612 (!!!), and was designated a World Heritage site a mere 387 years later. But it is a particularly difficult site to visit because - other than the pretty lines of trees and tidy grid of roads and canals - there's not really any there there. It's like the Greenwich, CT of Amsterdam. (This stage in the battle between the Dutch and the Sea is much better represented by Kinderdijk.)
Although great for postcards and Dutch branding, the windmills alone were not enough. Terrible floods racked the lower Delta region of the country, while the large bay of the Zuiderzee (the "Southern Sea" that in fact lay north of Amsterdam) stubbornly ate away at the interior of the country. In the mid-1800s, the government forced the evacuation of one large island in the Zuiderzee, Schokland, having grown tired of funding the fight for such a lost cause.
But then a new era of dam and dike building began after WWI. The Zuiderzee was blocked off from the North Sea by a giant dike, the Afsluitdijk, and renamed the IJsselmeer. Land was drained, forming entire new provinces in the 1940s - and Schokland resurfaced in the midst of vast new tracts of farmland, a squiggly shaped plateau disrupting the planned geometry of the orderly and otherwise flat polders. (Side note: I love that the Netherlands' newest province, est. 1986, is named Flevoland. As in "Flavor Flav-o-land.")
Of course, it is the Afsluitdijk that should be the World Heritage site, but it serves too practical a purpose to be saddled with bureaucratic protections. Instead, Schokland was made a World Heritage site - a rather mournful one, about the communities lost to the Sea.
Also a World Heritage site: a nearby pumping station from the early 1900s that helped drain the northern polders. I am glad to report that I do have a learning curve: after our experiences with all-Dutch tours of the Parliament in The Hague and the caves outside Maastricht, we skipped the D.F. Wouda Steam Pumping Station when we learned that the hour-long, largely technical tour about the intricacies of steam-powered water pumps was most decidedly not in English.
But that's not all. There's yet another water-themed World Heritage site in the Netherlands: the defense ring of Amsterdam. A series of forts built in the early 1900s, the defense ring was meant to use the dike-and-polder system to flood the fields surrounding Amsterdam in case an army invaded the country. As we all know, that didn't work out so well. But there's something rather charming in the idea of building a Maginot line where water, not guns, would protect the heart of the country.
These forts are quite numerous and are in varying states of ruin or rehabilitation. The one we visited, once used as a military prison to house conscientuous objectors, is now a simple military museum, with sheep grazing across its earth-covered dome of a roof.
Personally, I think the World Heritage Committee got the point across with designating Kinderdijk as a World Heritage site, though I do appreciate the Wadden Sea as a unique nature preserve. But the rest just seem extraneous, and do not hold a candle to the likes of Yosemite, the Coliseum, and Prague in terms of outstanding beauty, cultural significance, and relative interest to tourists. As Jeff sums it up, not all World Heritage sites are created equal.
But in the right order, they do tell the arch of the defining Dutch story. It goes something like this:
In the beginning, there was land, and there was Sea. And then the Sea breached the land, and the land was flooded. This was understandably frustrating to the people who thought they lived there. (The Wadden Sea will remain permanently stuck in this stage of the story, now that it is protected as a World Heritage site. But no one really wants to live that far north anyway.)
At first the people tried to fight the Sea by building their houses and churches on terps (mounds of earth) and constructing sea walls and sand bars. This was not very successful. Eventually the ingenuous Dutch realized they could use windmills to pump water up and out of low-lying land.
Although great for postcards and Dutch branding, the windmills alone were not enough. Terrible floods racked the lower Delta region of the country, while the large bay of the Zuiderzee (the "Southern Sea" that in fact lay north of Amsterdam) stubbornly ate away at the interior of the country. In the mid-1800s, the government forced the evacuation of one large island in the Zuiderzee, Schokland, having grown tired of funding the fight for such a lost cause.
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| Standing on the seawall of what was the island of Shockland. |
Of course, it is the Afsluitdijk that should be the World Heritage site, but it serves too practical a purpose to be saddled with bureaucratic protections. Instead, Schokland was made a World Heritage site - a rather mournful one, about the communities lost to the Sea.
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| The Afsluitdijk: Also a major freeway. |
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| Pump it up, Wouda. |
But that's not all. There's yet another water-themed World Heritage site in the Netherlands: the defense ring of Amsterdam. A series of forts built in the early 1900s, the defense ring was meant to use the dike-and-polder system to flood the fields surrounding Amsterdam in case an army invaded the country. As we all know, that didn't work out so well. But there's something rather charming in the idea of building a Maginot line where water, not guns, would protect the heart of the country.
These forts are quite numerous and are in varying states of ruin or rehabilitation. The one we visited, once used as a military prison to house conscientuous objectors, is now a simple military museum, with sheep grazing across its earth-covered dome of a roof.
Personally, I think the World Heritage Committee got the point across with designating Kinderdijk as a World Heritage site, though I do appreciate the Wadden Sea as a unique nature preserve. But the rest just seem extraneous, and do not hold a candle to the likes of Yosemite, the Coliseum, and Prague in terms of outstanding beauty, cultural significance, and relative interest to tourists. As Jeff sums it up, not all World Heritage sites are created equal.
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| Looking at the IJsselmeer from the Afsluitdijk: the Sea, tamed. |
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