Welcome to the Netherlands Portal
Welkom bij het Nederlandportaal!
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The Netherlands (Dutch: Nederland [ˈneːdərlɑnt] (listen)), informally Holland, is a country located in Northwestern Europe with overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of 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 in the North Sea. The country's 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.
With a population of 17.7 million people, all living within a total area of 41,850 km2 (16,160 sq mi)—of which the land area is 33,500 km2 (12,900 sq mi)—the Netherlands is the 16th most densely populated country in the world and the second-most densely populated country in the European Union, with a density of 520 people per square kilometre (1,300 people/sq mi). Nevertheless, it is the world's second-largest exporter of food and agricultural products by value, owing to its fertile soil, mild climate, intensive agriculture, and inventiveness.
The Netherlands has been a parliamentary constitutional monarchy with a unitary structure since 1848. The country has a tradition of pillarisation and a long record of social tolerance, having legalised abortion, 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 thirteenth-highest per capita income globally. The Netherlands ranks among the highest in international indices of press freedom, economic freedom, human development and quality of life, as well as happiness. (Full article...)
Selected biography
Anne and her family moved to Amsterdam in 1933 after the Nazis gained power in Germany, and were trapped by the occupation of the Netherlands, which began in 1940. As persecutions against the Jewish population increased, the family went into hiding in July 1942 in hidden rooms in her father Otto Frank's office building. After two years, the group was betrayed and transported to concentration camps. Seven months after her arrest, Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, within days of the death of her sister, Margot Frank. Her father Otto, the only survivor of the group, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find that her diary had been saved, and his efforts led to its publication in 1947. It was translated from its original Dutch and first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl.
Did you know (auto-generated)
- ... that Dutch soprano Jo Vincent appeared in Willem Mengelberg's 1939 recording of Bach's St Matthew Passion, and in the world premiere of Britten's Spring Symphony in 1949?
- ... that in 1969, the first women's strike for equal pay in the Netherlands was called in a cigar factory in Nieuwe Pekela?
- ... that Alois Wyrsch, the first member of colour of the Swiss parliament, was born to a mercenary in the Dutch Indies in 1825?
- ... that Rafflesia meijeri was named after Dutch botanist Willem Meijer for his work on the conservation and study of Rafflesia plants?
- ... that Dutch arachnologist Father Chrysanthus was the only person to make the International Society of Arachnology's first congress "international"?
- ... that about 700 airmen – and Ida Veldhuyzen van Zanten – have received the Dutch Airman's Cross?
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