I was vaguely listening to something in my doctor’s office about a new country near the Netherlands, which was created entirely by draining a large body of water. By the time I looked up and started paying attention, it was my turn for the doctor. I think I heard them say the name once - “Fradenland” or something like that. The host was showing old anchors and shipping moors sitting in the middle of lush green fields, which apparently were very good for farming due to the rich mineral deposits in the soil.
It seems to me that if a new country was created out of landfill recently, it would have gotten more press. Can someone steer me towards more information about this?
For centuries the Netherlands (is the word “THE” capitalized??) has been draining the sea to make more land. They are called polders(sp?) I think this is what it is about.
I may be misleading by saying it was a “part” of the Netherlands - it was near there, but they definitely had a specific name for this place, and implied that it was its own seperate country.
Could it have been Friesland? It is part of the Netherlands, and has been around long enough that the Frisians have their own language (dialect?), but it’s an agarian land that has been extensively drained.
There is no new land in that area that doesn’t come under some existing political system.
Since I am from the Netherlands - I might be able to shed light on this…
We had this inland sea - called the “Zuidermeer” (Southernlake). About 50 years ago we used windmills to pump away the water and claim the land called Flevoland…Flevoland is no seperate country but a ‘provincie’. There are now 13 provincies…Most people wonder if Holland is a country as well - it is not. There are 2 provincies called Holland (North and South) who are the most affluent. These areas contain Amsterdam (Capitol), Den Haag (Political capitol) and Rotterdam (one of the world largest seaports).
It was most definitely Flevoland. I’m sure they were calling it a province and I misunderstood or remembered wrong. Bob Scene, this is what made me look up at the TV - I was also confused about the fertility of former seawater.
Thanks for your help everyone!! I love this place.
Incidentally, the Great Wall of China itself would be invisible from space, but I bet you could see the Polders of Holland from a respectably long distance off… just about the largest works of Man on the planet, I should imagine.
Now I don’t buy the conspiracy myself (Heck, I’m half Netherlander ancestry myself, and live on Lake Michigan, and I was never invited to join!) but who knows what is the truth?
Here’s another link “exploding” the secret conspiracy.
about the saltness of the newclaimed land, former sea
I have never heard of salty soil being a big problem. On the contrary, the fat blue clay that was former seafloor is quite fertile. Flevoland is a vast expance of cropfields.
Flevoland was reclaimed from the IJsselmeer in the period 1950-1968, and the IJsselmeer had been non-salty for 20 years then, ever since the the building of the Afsluitdijk in 1932.
I understand that the rain draining down is sufficient to keep the little remaining salt down in the ground.
Ironically, salt groundwater is a big problem in some polders near the sea’s edge, in the provinces North and South-Holland, reclaimed 200 years ago. These low lying grounds are pumped dry, to grow crops on. But as the water gets pumped out, and there is no more dwnward pressure from the sweet water , seawater from the other side of the dunes wells up. So farmers there are faced with a tough choice: their soils are either too wet or too salt . (The answer is to grow different crops instead of those tulip-bulbs, of course)
A few years ago I went to visit Noord-Oostpolder, (the same as Flevoland only made about 10 years before) When you enter the province by car, the road descends about 5 metres and a sign says you are now so many metres below sea-level.
It’s does not seem spectacular, but wehn you think about it, it is…
The surface is remarkably flat. Every now and then you see a small hill with old houses and old trees on it. Those are the old islands. The nicest is Schokland, that has the most interesting little museum I know. It tells the story about the island losing some more surface to the sea every year before Flevoland was made. When the water was high, the islanders had to get walkingplanks to get to each others houses etc. In the end they all left.
Another unexpectantly beautiful little museum is the Scheepvaartmuseum in Ketelhaven (Ketelhaven lies at the north-edge of Flevoland, less then an hour’s drive from Schokland) that has lovely displays about how the polders were reclaimed. It also shows real shipwrecks that showed up in the fields after the polder was drained. (the image sketched in the OP of anchors, fishes and ship-parts sticking out of the fields is 100% true here, and they show splendid foto’s of it in this museum) Most of those shipwrecks were less then 100 years old so the history of them has been dug up from the archives and told in the museum.
Imagine reading:
“Early october 1794, the good schip Neeltje Jacoba set out from Amsterdam for Friesland. It held a cargo of 400 pieces of leather for Kopenhagen. Aboard were shipper Pieter de Vriesch and his two daughters. Alas, it would never reach it, for the ship went down in a fierce october gale…”
Reading this, (and reading some more on how the widow de Vriesch had to make a living afterward) and looking at the actual ship on display, restored, and you feel between your fingers the leather that has been on the seabottom for 150 years…
To answer the OP, there are plans to make another big part of sea into land. Engineers are talking about the Maasvlakte. Maasvlakte would mean extending the big seaport of Rotterdam into the sea. Already part of it is created, but they wanted to make it substantially bigger. Here you can read more about Maasvlakte
Note that “inland seas” such as the Zuidermeer are Estuaries (flooded river valleys) and aren’t really “ocean” although they lay adjacent to and drain into the oceans. Rather, the rivers (and subjacent unconfined aquifers) that drain into the oceans via these estuaries keep them relatively fresh, and brackish at worst. Thus, the land recovered from these estuaries won’t be overly salty at all.
Here’s a cool animated example from America’s largest estuary:
Hey Mestreech…Wie geht ut in Sjeng-city?? Groete oet Washington DC van unne echte vallekeberger
TTT - you are correct. I hang my head in shame - I haven’t lived in the Netherlands for 6 years but that’s no excuse for forgetting that
Hup voor Valkenburg! In Maastricht we’ve only just recovered from the “Bonte Storrem” (our heavy-duty Mardi-Gras) of course. And the Vrijthof has been totally broken up again because some kind of concrete-rot had invaded a pillar…
I am thinking of starting a thread called:
“Dutch dopers: what’s it like to post in English?”… Hope you and TTT will contribute then!
