Holland Geography, Climate & Nature

The country occupies the delta where the Rhine, the Meuse and the Scheldt meet the North Sea, in about 41,000 square kilometres. It is among the flattest and most densely populated countries in the world, and about a quarter of it lies below sea level.

The Randstad

The horseshoe of cities in the west -- Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht -- holds most of the population and nearly all the destinations. It functions as a single urban region with farmland in the middle, which is why the train journeys between them are so short.

Polders

Land reclaimed by diking and draining, first with windmills and later with steam and electric pumps. Flevoland, created between the 1950s and 1968, is the largest artificial island in the world. Drained peat shrinks as it dries, so the ground keeps sinking and the pumping never stops.

The coast and the islands

A near-continuous dune barrier runs the length of the North Sea coast, with long beaches behind it. North of that, the Wadden Sea -- around ten thousand square kilometres of tidal flat shared with Germany and Denmark -- and the barrier islands strung along its seaward edge.

The higher ground

The east has sandy heath and forest, most extensively on the Veluwe. Only the far south of Limburg, around Maastricht, has hills worth the name, and they are why that corner of the country feels like a different one.

The climate is maritime and mild, governed by the North Sea and the prevailing westerlies. Winters average roughly 2 to 6°C and summers 17 to 22°C, so the range is narrow by continental standards and the extremes are rare.

Rain, spread thin

Around 800 millimetres a year, distributed fairly evenly across every month rather than concentrated in a season. It falls on about half the days of the year and usually lightly. The practical consequence for a visitor is that waiting for a clear day is not a strategy -- take the coat and carry on, which is what everyone else is doing.

Wind

Flat, open and exposed, with a constant wind off the sea. It is why the windmills existed and why the offshore wind industry is large, and it is why cycling into a headwind on level ground is harder work than a hill.

The seasons that actually differ

The temperature varies less than the light. Midsummer stays light until nearly eleven at night; in December it is dark by half past four, and that shift is a bigger adjustment for most visitors than anything the thermometer does.

Storms and surges

Autumn and winter Atlantic storms combined with high tides produce the surges the sea defences exist for. The barriers close a handful of times a decade -- an engineering event rather than a travel one, but it is the reason the coast looks the way it does.

This is a small, flat, intensively farmed country with very little wilderness, and its ecology is correspondingly unusual: the habitats that matter are mostly ones that water management created or maintains. Almost every significant natural area here exists in its current form because of a decision about drainage.

The Wadden Sea is the exception in scale -- around ten thousand square kilometres of tidal flat, sandbank and barrier island along the northern coast, shared with Germany and Denmark and inscribed by UNESCO in 2009, with the Danish part added in 2014. It drains almost completely twice a day and refills, and that rhythm is the basis of everything living in it.

Inland, the important habitats are polder wetland, peat meadow and shallow lake. The Oostvaardersplassen in Flevoland -- fifty-six square kilometres of reedbed and open water -- is the clearest example of the pattern: a polder drained from the sea in 1968 and earmarked for industry, colonised by water birds before anything was built on it, and made a reserve instead.

The pressures are what a country this crowded would predict: intensive agriculture, a water table managed for farming rather than for nature, and peat soils that release carbon and sink as they dry. In the Wadden Sea the named threat is different again -- introduced algae, plants and smaller organisms displacing what was there. Dutch conservation is rarely about leaving land alone, because there is almost none to leave. It is about deciding what the pumps are for.

The wildlife here is overwhelmingly birds, and the best of it is in the months when most people do not come. The coast sits on a major migration route, and the tidal flats of the Wadden Sea feed hundreds of thousands of waders, ducks and geese passing through or wintering. Autumn and winter, not summer, are the season.

Harbour and grey seals breed on the Wadden sandbanks and are the large mammal a visitor is most likely to see, hauled out at low tide. The same tidal rhythm makes wadlopen possible -- walking out across the flats when the sea has withdrawn, which is a guided activity for reasons that should be obvious.

The Oostvaardersplassen is the country's most argued-about wildlife site. Konik horses, red deer and Heck cattle were introduced to graze it open so that water birds would keep the habitat they had colonised. It worked ecologically and failed publicly: animals starved in the hard winter of 2005, and in the winter of 2017-18 almost 3,300 horses, deer and cattle died. A provincial commission reported in 2018 and policy shifted from rewilding to active management. The birds it was maintained for -- white-tailed eagle, bittern, kingfisher, grey heron -- are still there.

Two trends are worth carrying. Meadow birds are in trouble: the black-tailed godwit, the characteristic bird of wet Dutch grassland, is classed as Near Threatened after a decline of roughly a quarter over three generations, and an important share of the European population now nests in arable fields instead. And wolves have returned and some are settling, which in a country with this little room is a live and contested subject.