Welcome to the Netherlands Portal
Welkom bij het Nederlandportaal!
The Netherlands, informally Holland, is a country located in Northwestern Europe with overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The Netherlands consists of twelve provinces; it borders Germany to the east and Belgium to the south, with a North Sea coastline to the north and west. It shares maritime borders with the United Kingdom, Germany, and Belgium. The official language is Dutch, with West Frisian as a secondary official language in the province of Friesland. Dutch, English, and Papiamento are official in the Caribbean territories.
The Netherlands has been a parliamentary constitutional monarchy with a unitary structure since 1848. The country has a tradition of pillarisation (separation of citizens into groups by religion and political beliefs) and a long record of social tolerance, having legalised prostitution and euthanasia, along with maintaining a liberal drug policy. The Netherlands allowed women's suffrage in 1919 and was the first country to legalise same-sex marriage in 2001. Its mixed-market advanced economy has the eleventh-highest per capita income globally. The Hague holds the seat of the States General, Cabinet, and Supreme Court. The Port of Rotterdam is the busiest in Europe. Schiphol is the busiest airport in the Netherlands, and the fourth busiest in Europe. Being a developed country, the Netherlands is a founding member of the European Union, Eurozone, G10, NATO, OECD, and WTO, as well as a part of the Schengen Area and the trilateral Benelux Union. It hosts intergovernmental organisations and international courts, many of which are in The Hague. (Full article...)
Selected biography
Enchanted by his new homeland of New Netherland, Van der Donck made detailed accounts of the land, vegetation, animals, waterways, topography, and climate. Van der Donck used this knowledge to actively promote immigration to the colony, publishing several tracts, including his influential Description of New Netherland. Charles Gehring, Director of the New Netherland Project, has called it "the fullest account of the province, its geography, the Indians who inhabited it, and its prospects…It has been said that had it not been written in Dutch, it would have gone down as one of the great works of American colonial literature."
Did you know (auto-generated)
- ... that Bearded Man with a Beret by the Dutch artist Jan Lievens is an example of a tronie?
- ... that Hendrik Wortman oversaw the early development of the Zuiderzee Works, which dammed off the Zuiderzee to create arable land in the Netherlands?
- ... that a 2021 Dutch translation of the Bible introduces five new animals?
- ... that the Nazis killed more than fifty Dutch nationals in retaliation for the assassinations of Hendrik Seyffardt and Hermannus Reydon by the Dutch resistance?
- ... that Tobie Goedewaagen, a minister under the Nazi occupation government, fled the Netherlands with his belongings in a bedspread?
- ... that Dutch arachnologist Father Chrysanthus was the only person to make the International Society of Arachnology's first congress "international"?
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