Eastern of Amsterdam used to be the Zuiderzee, a shallow inlet of the North Sea, like a gigantic bay 50 Km wide and 100 Km long. This used to be a danger for The Netherlands and in fact flooded several time in the past centuries. After the last flood in 1916, the Dutch decided to build a huge dike and close the Zuiderzee. In 1932 thirty kilometers of dike running through the water were completed, closing off the North Sea and forming the IJsselmeer lake, that then turned into fresh water. During the 20th century wide chunks of IJsselmeer were transformed in polders and reclaimed to the sea, transformed in land. Moreover the IJsselmeer has been split by an additional dike, forming the Markermeer.
There is a popular saying that God created the world but the Dutch created the Netherlands, and when you traverse IJsselmeer on the dike and drive through Flevoland you really understand what this means. Reclaiming land from the sea, fighting to keep water out of the land, is an impressive endevour and makes you think about the never ending challenge between mankind and the forces of nature. There, where land, water and sky merge in a total whole, you finally feel that Planet Earth is a very big place to live.
While driving you can see people a lot of cyclers (by the way: even dikes and roads lost in the middle of nowhere have at least one lane reserved to bicycles), birds, gigantic wind power farms, fisher villages, windmills. Did you know windmills are pumps? They were used to pump water out of the polders and pushing to the sea, to reclaim land. Weren’t for the strong constant wind flowing in this place, bug chunks of Netherland would be under water. This in another impressive engineering achievement, especially if you think they began to use windmills six centuries ago. Of course nowadays they use electrical pumps.
