100 Fun Facts About Netherlands

Which Dutch province shares its name with a neighbouring Belgian province?

Limburg was a single territory until Belgium broke away from the Netherlands in the 1830s; the border finally agreed in 1839 left a province called Limburg on each side.

Which non-capital city is the seat of the Dutch government, parliament and Supreme Court?

The Hague has been the seat of government since the days of the Dutch Republic, yet the official capital is Amsterdam, where neither the cabinet nor parliament sits.

Roughly what share of the Netherlands' land area lies below sea level?

26%, about a quarter of the country, lies below sea level, and roughly half of it sits no more than a metre above; dikes, dunes and pumps are all that keep it dry.

Which two countries meet the Netherlands at the Vaalserberg?

Belgium and Germany meet the Netherlands at the Three-Country Point, 322 metres up; for most of the 19th century a fourth territory, tiny Neutral Moresnet, touched the same spot.

Which Netherlands province, established in 1986, was reclaimed from the former Zuiderzee?

Flevoland lay under water within living memory: its polders were pumped dry between 1942 and 1968, and its capital, Lelystad, is named after the engineer who planned the whole scheme.

When the 32 km Afsluitdijk sealed off the Zuiderzee in 1932, the salt inlet became which freshwater lake?

IJsselmeer: once the dam shut out the North Sea tides, the salt was gradually flushed away, and a stormy arm of the sea became a calm freshwater lake.

The Delta Works, a vast system of dams and storm-surge barriers, were commissioned in response to which disaster?

The 1953 North Sea flood drowned more than 1,800 people in the Netherlands; the answer was to dam the estuaries and shorten the coastline, so that far fewer dikes were left facing the sea.

Which Dutch city completed the world's largest bicycle garage, with 12,500 spaces, beside its main station in 2019?

Utrecht built it for a country that owns more bicycles than it has people and makes more than a quarter of all its journeys by bike.

The Netherlands sits at the mouths of the Rhine, the Maas and which third major European river?

Scheldt: its mouth is Dutch but its great port, Antwerp, is not, and after 1585 the Dutch Republic closed the river to shipping for generations to choke off its rival's trade.

Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport stands on what kind of site?

A drained lake bed: the Haarlemmermeer, a lake big enough to stage a naval battle in the 1570s, was pumped dry in the 19th century, so planes now land several metres below sea level.

Which Dutch province gave its name to a country first charted by Abel Tasman?

Zeeland: Tasman himself called the land Staten Land, thinking it joined territory off South America, so it was Dutch mapmakers who renamed it Nova Zeelandia, later anglicised.

What does the name 'Netherlands' literally mean?

Lower countries: 'nether' is an old word for lower, and the name once covered the whole low-lying region, which is why 'the Low Countries' still takes in Belgium and Luxembourg.

Which city's centre was destroyed by Luftwaffe bombing on 14 May 1940, prompting Dutch surrender?

Rotterdam's old centre burned in a single raid that left tens of thousands homeless; when the Germans threatened other cities with the same, the Dutch command surrendered.

Batavia, the Asian headquarters of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), is today which city?

Jakarta: the Dutch East India Company seized the port of Jayakarta in 1619 and built its own headquarters town on the site, and the name Batavia lasted until the 1940s.

William the Silent, leader of the Dutch Revolt, was shot dead by Balthasar Gérard in 1584 in which city?

Delft still shows the bullet holes in the wall of the Prinsenhof, and because William was buried in the town's Nieuwe Kerk, the Dutch royal family has been laid to rest there ever since.

The first letters of the 15 stanzas of the Dutch national anthem spell out what?

Willem van Nassov is an old spelling of William of Nassau, in whose voice the song is sung; the Dutch sang it from the 1570s, yet it became the official anthem only in 1932.

Which spirit, copied by English distillers from a Dutch drink, set off London's 18th-century 'craze'?

Gin is short for 'geneva', an English mangling of the Dutch genever, meaning juniper, the berry that flavours both drinks; the Swiss city of Geneva has nothing to do with it.

The Eighty Years' War, ended by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, won Dutch independence from which crown?

Spain's Habsburg kings had inherited the Low Countries, and the revolt against them that began in 1568 ended only when the Spanish crown recognised the Dutch Republic at Münster.

In the famous Dutch bubble of 1637, what sold for a small fortune?

Tulip bulbs of rare varieties could fetch more than ten times a skilled craftsman's yearly income, until doubts set in and the whole market collapsed almost overnight.

In 1672 the Dutch halted which invading kingdom's army by deliberately flooding a strip of their own land?

France had overrun much of the republic when the Dutch opened the sluices of the Holland Water Line and stopped its army short of Amsterdam; they still call 1672 the Rampjaar, the disaster year.

Sent on from Auschwitz, Anne Frank died in which concentration camp?

Bergen-Belsen: Anne and her sister Margot died there, probably of typhus, in February or March 1945, not long before British troops freed the camp; of the family, only their father Otto survived.

What do the Dutch call the winter of 1944–45, when a German blockade cut off the occupied western provinces?

Hunger Winter: about 20,000 people died and soup kitchens were boiling sugar beets and potato peelings before, in the war's last days, Allied bombers dropped food instead of bombs.

Operation Market Garden failed to capture the Rhine bridge in which Dutch city?

Arnhem: a small British airborne force held one end of the bridge for four days, waiting for tanks that never arrived, the stand retold in the book and film A Bridge Too Far.

Which American city began life in the 1620s as the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam?

New York: the English seized the town in 1664 and renamed it for the Duke of York, but the Dutch left their mark: Wall Street follows the line of the wall they built across Manhattan.

Signed in 1992, the treaty that created the European Union takes its name from which Dutch city?

Maastricht gave its name to the treaty that turned the European Community into the European Union, created a shared EU citizenship and set the course for a single currency, the euro.

Which Dutch national holiday, held on 27 April, turns city streets into one big flea market?

King's Day marks Willem-Alexander's birthday, and it is the one day of the year when anyone may sell on the street without a permit, so whole cities turn into a second-hand market.

How does Sinterklaas traditionally arrive in the Netherlands each November?

By steamboat, to a nationally televised welcome; among the descendants of Dutch settlers in America, the name Sinterklaas was worn down into Santa Claus.

The stroopwafel, two thin waffles glued with caramel syrup, was first made in which South Holland city?

Gouda's bakers, probably Gerard Kamphuisen first, are said to have stuck leftover dough and crumbs together with syrup, turning the bakery's scraps into a sweet treat.

Which North Holland city holds a famous Friday cheese market where deals end with a hand clap?

Alkmaar's guild of cheese porters still works the market in teams, each marked by a different coloured straw hat, hauling the cheese to the weigh house on heavy wooden barrows.

Which UNESCO-listed Dutch village is known for its 19 windmills, built around 1740?

Kinderdijk's mills kept the low-lying polder dry for well over a century, until sinking land and rising water forced the water boards to bring in steam pumping stations.

Which Dutch garden plants seven million bulbs yet opens just eight weeks a year?

Keukenhof means 'kitchen garden': in the 15th century its grounds supplied game, fruit and vegetables to Countess Jacoba's castle, long before anyone thought of planting them for show.

The Dutch red-white-blue evolved from the 16th-century Prinsenvlag, whose top band was which colour?

Orange was the colour of William of Orange, who led the revolt; red took its place on the flag in the 17th century, yet orange is still what Dutch crowds wear to every big match.

Which English word is borrowed from the Dutch 'koekje'?

Cookie comes from koekje, 'little cake', a word that entered American English from Dutch, which is why Americans bake cookies while the British still call them biscuits.

West Frisian is a co-official language in which Dutch province?

It is closer to English than Dutch is; the province also lends its name to the black-and-white Friesian cow.

Which Rembrandt painting was slashed with a knife by a visitor to the Rijksmuseum in 1975?

The Night Watch took several long zig-zag cuts that needed months of repair; it had been cut before, in 1715, when all four sides were trimmed to fit a new wall and two militiamen vanished.

Vermeer's 'Girl with a Pearl Earring' has hung since 1902 in which museum?

Mauritshuis received it in a collector's will: he had picked the grimy canvas up at an auction in 1881 for two guilders and thirty cents, and it is now the museum's star.

Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853 in the village of Zundert, in which province?

North Brabant was mostly Catholic and his father was a Protestant minister there; the farm labourers Vincent drew in the province became The Potato Eaters, his first major work.

Piet Mondrian co-founded which movement and journal with Theo van Doesburg in 1917?

De Stijl means 'The Style': its painters kept to straight lines and primary colours until, around 1924, the movement took up diagonals and turned its back on Mondrian's own rules.

Which Dutch footballer left Sweden's Jan Olsson stranded at the 1974 World Cup with a turn named after him?

Johan Cruyff shaped to pass, dragged the ball behind his standing leg and spun away; the Dutch reached the final that summer but lost it to the hosts, West Germany.

Which team did the Netherlands beat in the final to win Euro 1988, its first major title?

Soviet Union: Ruud Gullit scored the first and Marco van Basten met a looping cross with a volley from a tight angle that dipped under the bar for 2–0.

Which sport has produced the great majority of the Netherlands' Winter Olympic medals?

Speed skating is a national obsession born on frozen canals: its great test, the Elfstedentocht, covers almost 200 km of natural ice, so rare now that the race was last run in 1997.

Fanny Blankers-Koen, who won four gold medals at the 1948 London Olympics, was known by what nickname?

The Flying Housewife was a 30-year-old mother of two, and the British team's manager had judged her too old to make the grade; she answered with four gold medals.

Max Verstappen won on his debut for which team in 2016, becoming Formula One's youngest race winner at 18?

Red Bull had swapped him into the seat from its junior team, Toro Rosso, just before the Spanish Grand Prix, and he won at the first attempt, aged 18 years and 228 days.

Whom did Willem-Alexander succeed in 2013 to become the first Dutch king since 1890?

Queen Beatrix stepped down for her son after 33 years on the throne, ending a line of queens that had run unbroken since William III died in 1890.

King Willem-Alexander revealed in 2017 that he had spent years quietly co-piloting passenger flights for which airline?

KLM had him at the controls of its short-haul jets twice a month, even after he became king; he never gave his name over the intercom, though some passengers recognised the voice.

On which September occasion does the Dutch monarch ride to parliament in a coach and read the speech from the throne?

Prinsjesdag, 'Prince's Day', falls on the third Tuesday of September; once the speech is read, the finance minister carries the national budget into parliament in a special briefcase.

In 2001 the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalise what?

Same-sex marriage became law on 1 April 2001, and Amsterdam's mayor, Job Cohen, marked the day by marrying four couples himself.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a draper who ground his own lenses, is remembered as the father of which science?

Microbiology began with his home-made single-lens microscopes: he was the first to see microbes, called them 'little animals', and described them in letters to London's Royal Society for fifty years.

Which moon of Saturn did the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens discover in 1655?

Titan showed up in a telescope Huygens had built with his brother, and 350 years later the European probe that parachuted onto the moon's surface carried his name.

Dutch engineer Vic Hayes, who chaired the IEEE 802.11 working group, is the 'father' of which technology?

Wi-Fi is the everyday name for the 802.11 standards drawn up by the group he chaired from 1990 to 2000; Hayes then rallied the computer industry to win it extra 5 GHz radio spectrum at the 2003 World Radio Conference.

A novelist from which country popularised the tale of a Dutch boy plugging a dike with his finger?

United States author Mary Mapes Dodge told the tale in her 1865 novel Hans Brinker, written before she had ever visited the Netherlands. Dutch towns later put up statues of the boy for tourists.

Why does a beam with a hook jut from the gable of many old Amsterdam canal houses?

To hoist up goods like spices and cocoa, merchants kept their stock in the attic and hauled it by pulley. Later owners kept the pulleys mainly for moving furniture.

Dutch people rank first among the world's nationalities for which average body measurement?

Height is the Dutch claim to fame: men averaged about 1.81 metres in 2009. Young Dutchmen grew from roughly 5 ft 4 in to about 6 ft between the 1850s and the early 2000s.

Hagelslag, which the Dutch scatter over buttered bread at breakfast, is what kind of topping?

Chocolate sprinkles top an estimated 750,000 Dutch sandwiches every day. The name hagelslag means 'hailstorm', and the country gets through more than 14 million kilograms a year.

Which fish do the Dutch eat raw with chopped onion, often lowering it into the mouth by its tail?

Herring is so prized that the season's first catch, Hollandse Nieuwe, gets its own spring festival, Vlaggetjesdag or Flag Day, when the fishing boats put to sea.

In 2017 the Dutch railway NS announced that all its electric trains ran on which energy source?

Wind took over a year ahead of schedule: the railway's ten-year deal with the energy firm Eneco had set January 2018 as the date for every train to switch.

Which rock guitarist, born in Amsterdam in 1955, co-founded the band that hit number one with 'Jump'?

Eddie Van Halen left the Netherlands as a boy in 1962, when his family settled in Pasadena. 'Jump' became his band's only number-one single on the Billboard Hot 100.

Which reality TV format, first aired in the Netherlands in 1999, isolates housemates under constant cameras?

Big Brother was devised by the Dutch producer John de Mol and borrows its title from the all-seeing ruler of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

All-wooden Dutch clogs carry a European CE mark that officially accredits them as what kind of footwear?

Safety shoes is their official rating: all-wooden clogs can withstand sharp objects and concentrated acids. About three million pairs are made a year, and some farmers still wear them daily.

Which children's character, drawn by Dick Bruna from 1955, is known in the Netherlands as Nijntje?

Miffy takes her Dutch name from 'konijntje', little rabbit, a word Bruna's small son could not pronounce. She became a girl only in 1970, when Bruna wanted to draw a dress.

Queen Máxima, who married the future Dutch king in 2002, was born in which South American country?

Argentina made the match awkward: her father had been a minister in its military dictatorship, which stirred controversy in the Netherlands before the wedding.

Which Leeuwarden-born exotic dancer was shot by a firing squad in 1917 as a convicted wartime spy?

Mata Hari was the stage name of Margaretha Zelle; it means 'eye of the day', a phrase for the sun. Despite long-held rumours of Javanese descent, both her parents were Dutch.

Which hotel-reservation website, based in Amsterdam, was started in 1996 by Dutch student Geert-Jan Bruinsma?

Booking.com began life as Bruinsma's student venture at the University of Twente. Priceline bought the company in 2005 for $133 million and later renamed itself after it.

Which programming language, created by Dutchman Guido van Rossum, is named after a British comedy troupe?

Python honours the comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus, not the snake. Its users titled van Rossum their 'benevolent dictator for life', a role he gave up in 2018.

Which company, founded in Eindhoven in 1891 to make lamps, later developed the compact disc with Sony?

Philips also gave Eindhoven its football club: PSV grew out of the sports association that the company set up for its employees in 1913.

Which beer, launched by a 19th-century Amsterdam brewer, is typically sold in a green bottle with a red star?

Heineken the company dates from 1864, when Gerard Adriaan Heineken bought De Hooiberg, 'The Haystack', an Amsterdam brewery founded in 1592. The first beer under his own name followed in 1873.

Which Dutch cheese, named after a North Holland town, is traditionally sold as a ball coated in red wax?

Edam hardens instead of spoiling as it ages, which made it the world's most popular cheese at sea and in remote colonies between the 14th and 18th centuries.

Which Dutch humanist, author of 'The Praise of Folly', gives his name to the EU's student exchange programme?

Erasmus doubles as an acronym: the scheme was launched in 1987 as the European Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students.

Which Dutch graphic artist, born in 1898, built his prints around impossible objects and tessellations?

M. C. Escher had no mathematical training and grasped the subject visually and intuitively, yet several of the worlds he drew were built around impossible objects.

Which language of South Africa grew out of the Dutch spoken by settlers at the Cape from the 17th century?

Afrikaans was once sneered at as 'kitchen Dutch', because enslaved workers spoke it in the kitchens of colonial settlers. An earlier, kinder name was Cape Dutch.

For two centuries Dutch merchants on Dejima island were the only Westerners allowed to trade with which country?

Japan confined the Dutch to an artificial island off Nagasaki from 1641, yet their texts fed 'rangaku', or Dutch learning, the study of Western science and medicine.

Which South American country, independent since 1975, has Dutch as its official language?

Suriname became firmly Dutch in 1667, when negotiators at the Treaty of Breda chose to keep the young plantation colony they had taken from the English.

Which currency, also called the florin, did the Netherlands use from 1434 until the euro replaced it in 2002?

Guilder comes from a Middle Dutch word meaning 'golden': the first coins were worth about the same as an Italian gold piece. It served as a reserve currency for 17th-century Europe.

Raymond van Barneveld, a five-time world champion nicknamed 'Barney', made which sport popular in the Netherlands?

Darts took off among the Dutch after his first world title in 1998. He went on to collect four BDO crowns and one PDC championship.

Which Dutch football club, named after a Greek hero of the Trojan War, won three consecutive European Cups from 1971?

Ajax were the first side since Real Madrid in the 1950s to win three in a row, which earned the club the right to keep the trophy permanently.

Amsterdam takes its name from a dam on which river, which flows through the city into the IJ?

Amstel has an old word for water or river at its root. The city first appears in a toll document of 1275 as Amestelledamme, 'the dam in the Amstel'.

Dutch 'zoute drop', a sweet with a salty kick from ammonium chloride, is a variety of which confection?

Liquorice with ammonium chloride was on sale as a pastille by the 1930s, and the Dutch go one further with 'dubbelzoute drop', a double salted version.

The Dutch town of Aalsmeer hosts, in one of the world's largest buildings, the biggest auction of what?

Flowers are sold in Aalsmeer by 'Dutch auction': the price starts high and drops until a buyer accepts it. The building covers 999,000 square metres, about 165 football pitches.

Which Dutch director moved to Hollywood and made 'RoboCop', 'Total Recall' and 'Basic Instinct'?

Paul Verhoeven saw both 'RoboCop' and 'Total Recall' win special-achievement Oscars, one for sound effects editing and the other for visual effects.

In which Dutch textile city did the Pilgrims live in exile before sailing for the New World on the Mayflower?

Leiden, then a thriving city of 30,000, gave the exiles work at its university and in the textile, printing and brewing trades.

Which Dutch word, adopted into English, names low-lying land reclaimed from water and ringed by dikes?

Polder upkeep demanded cooperation from every rank of society, which is why Dutch consensus politics is known as the Polder Model. The country has some 3,000 of them.

Madurodam, a Dutch tourist attraction opened in 1952, shows the country's famous landmarks in what form?

Miniatures at a scale of 1:25 fill the park, which is named after George Maduro, a Dutch law student and resistance fighter who died at Dachau in 1945.

Oliebollen, Dutch deep-fried dough balls dusted with powdered sugar, are traditionally eaten on which occasion?

New Year's Eve is the moment for these doughnuts, whose name means simply 'oil spheres'. Raisins are often baked inside, though some cooks use apple instead.

Willemstad, whose historic centre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is the capital of which Caribbean island?

Curaçao is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Willemstad was capital of the whole Netherlands Antilles until that grouping was dissolved in 2010.

Which Dutch painter, who died in 1516, created the triptych 'The Garden of Earthly Delights'?

Hieronymus Bosch was born Jheronimus van Aken; his painting name comes from his birthplace, 's-Hertogenbosch, which the Dutch call Den Bosch, 'the forest'.

Which Dutch DJ, born Tijs Verwest in Breda, was the first to play live on stage at an Olympic opening ceremony?

Tiësto played the 2004 Athens Games, the same year he finished a three-year run as number one in DJ Magazine's annual Top 100 poll.

Which fairy-tale theme park in Kaatsheuvel opened in 1952, three years before the original Disneyland?

Efteling grew from a nature park with a playground and a Fairytale Forest into the largest theme park in the Netherlands, twice the size of the original Disneyland.

Which timekeeper, the world's most precise until the 1930s, did Christiaan Huygens invent in the 1650s?

The pendulum clock was invented on Christmas Day 1656. Huygens built on Galileo's discovery that a pendulum's swing takes the same time whatever its size.

The English word 'easel' comes from the Dutch 'ezel', which originally meant which animal?

Donkey is the picture behind the word: a canvas is propped on its wooden stand the way a burden is loaded on the animal. English makes the same comparison in 'sawhorse'.

Which mixed-team sport with a ball and raised baskets was created in 1902 by Dutch teacher Nico Broekhuysen?

Korfball grew out of ringboll, a game Broekhuysen met on a gymnastics course in Sweden. He swapped its ring for a basket so that a score was easier to see.

The Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius escaped life imprisonment in Loevestein Castle in 1621 by hiding inside what?

A book chest that was regularly carried in and out for him became his way to freedom, with help from his wife and a maidservant. He fled to Paris, and the Dutch remember him chiefly for the escape.

Which Dutch skating tour of almost 200 km is held only when the natural ice is at least 15 cm thick?

Elfstedentocht means 'eleven cities tour'. Cold enough spells are so rare that the event has at times had to wait more than 20 years between one edition and the next.

Dutch inventor Cornelis Drebbel built the first navigable example of which vessel in 1620 for the English navy?

The submarine had a wooden frame covered in leather. A later, larger model is said to have carried James I on a test dive beneath the Thames, which would make him the first monarch to travel underwater.

Which Dutch astronomer proposed that a vast cloud of billions of comets surrounds the Solar System?

Jan Oort had earlier overturned the 'Kapteyn system', his own mentor's picture of a galaxy arranged symmetrically around the Sun. An impact crater on Pluto carries his name.

Which Dutch city on the river Waal celebrated 2,000 years of existence in 2005, having begun as a Roman army camp?

Nijmegen was the first place in the Netherlands to be recognised as a city in Roman times. The army chose the site for its hills, which gave a commanding view over the river valley.

Which Dutch admiral led the 1667 Raid on the Medway, carrying off the English flagship Royal Charles?

Michiel de Ruyter had only just recovered from a serious illness when he took command of the raid, a humiliation that effectively ended the war in favour of the Dutch.

Which 1860 novel by Multatuli attacked the corrupt colonial system that the Dutch ran on Java?

Max Havelaar was written by Eduard Douwes Dekker under a pen name, and it played a key role in reshaping Dutch colonial policy in the East Indies.

The Dutch hunebedden, built by Funnelbeaker farmers between 3470 and 3250 BC, are what kind of monument?

Megalithic tombs once numbered about 100 in the Netherlands, and 54 survive. Their builders used them until about 2760 BC, and later cultures reused the sites.

Which Amsterdam-born philosopher, author of the 'Ethics', was expelled from his Jewish community in 1656?

Baruch Spinoza went on to support himself by grinding lenses while he wrote. His family were Marranos who had fled Portugal for the more tolerant Dutch Republic.

Which peg-legged Dutch director-general surrendered the colony of New Netherland to the English in 1664?

Peter Stuyvesant lost his right leg to a battle wound and walked on a wooden stick studded with silver nails, which earned him the nickname 'Old Silver Nails'.