For all that the Bible says otherwise, the Dutch insist the Creation took 8 days, not 7 -- on the eighth day they reclaimed their country from the sea with their own hands. The all-important dikes, which hold back the sea, began to evolve as far back as the 1st century A.D., when the country's earliest inhabitants settled on unprotected coastal wetlands in the northern regions of Friesland and Groningen. These settlers first attempted to defend their land by building huge earthen mounds (terpen) on which they constructed their homes during recurring floods. Around the 8th and 9th centuries, they were building proper dikes; and by the end of the 13th century, entire coastal regions were enclosed by dikes that held back unruly rivers and the sea.
Holland is the great river delta of northwest Europe, tucked into a corner between Germany and Belgium. It's an embroidery of canals, rivers, lakes, and drainage channels -- there are 7,925 sq. km (3,090 sq. miles) of water within Holland's borders -- with a dense, sandy, and peatlike soil that tends to settle over time. The country sinks an average of 1m, or 39 inches, every 1,000 years. As a result, approximately 25% of Holland, an area that holds about two-thirds of its people, now lies below sea level, protected from flooding only by sand dunes, dikes, and Dutch engineering ingenuity. The fact that the solid, timeless buildings of Amsterdam and the city's 740,000 inhabitants stand where waves should by all rights be lapping is a difficult concept for foreigners to grasp.
In 1953, devastating North Sea storms broke through the dikes in many places along Holland's southwest coast, flooding significant areas. There was a substantial loss of life and property. In order to assure greater protection along its coastal areas, Holland embarked upon a long-range Delta Project to seal off the river estuaries in the southwest of the country.
While visiting Holland in 1859, Matthew Arnold was so amazed at what he saw that he wrote home, "The country has no business to be there at all." Maybe so, but the Dutch have a ready answer: "God made the earth," they tell you, "and the Dutch made Holland." Around half of the country's land area has been reclaimed, from the sea, lakes, and marshes. Some 2,600 sq. km (1,000 sq. miles) of the country was under water just 100 years ago.
Natural regions are formed by the low hills of the southeast; the forest in the center of the country (the provinces of Utrecht and Gelderland); the islands and former islands along the coast of the North Sea (the province of Zeeland in the southwest and a string of sandbar islands off the coast of the province of Friesland in the north); the polders of the former Zuiderzee; and the flat farmland of the rest of the country (some of which is actually old and well-established polder).
The "Great Rivers" -- the Rhine, the Waal, and the Maas (or Meuse, as it is known in Belgium, and in France where its headwaters lie) -- divide the country along geographic and spiritual lines. The Dutch living in the lower land "above," or north of, the rivers have long been predominantly Calvinist, whereas the population of the higher lands "below," or south of, the rivers has been traditionally Catholic. (Interestingly, the southerners, whose spiritual capital is Maastricht, lump Amsterdammers together with the other "cold-blooded" northerners as people too straitlaced to know how to enjoy themselves.)
In flat Holland, wind is ever present, so it is not surprising that the Dutch have made use of windmills to do their hard labor, from pumping water off the land to drain polders, to milling grain and sawing timber. Nowadays, you're as likely to see the whirling blades of wind-turbines, generating a growing proportion of the nation's electrical power.
