Portal:Netherlands
Welcome to the Netherlands Portal
Welkom bij het Nederlandportaal!
The Netherlands, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the 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. The 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.
The Netherlands has been a parliamentary constitutional monarchy with a unitary structure since 1848. The country has a tradition of pillarisation (separation of citizens into groups by religion and political beliefs) and a long record of social tolerance, having legalised 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 eleventh-highest per capita income globally. The Hague holds the seat of the States General, Cabinet, and Supreme Court. The Port of Rotterdam is the busiest in Europe. Schiphol is the busiest airport in the Netherlands, and the fourth busiest in Europe. Being a developed country, the Netherlands is a founding member of the European Union, Eurozone, G10, NATO, OECD, and WTO, as well as a part of the Schengen Area and the trilateral Benelux Union. It hosts intergovernmental organisations and international courts, many of which are in The Hague. (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 Jopie and Teun Roosenburg led an art colony at Oost Castle that helped Jewish refugees escape the Nazi-occupied Netherlands to Belgium?
- ... that Albert Smijers was one of the first Dutch musicologists to receive a doctorate?
- ... that Jacob Christiaan Koningsberger, a biologist who catalogued the flora and fauna of Java, also served as the Dutch minister of the colonies?
- ... that Prawoto Mangkusasmito did not complete law school before the Japanese invaded because he was too busy with student and political organizations?
- ... that the directors of the Dutchess and Columbia Railroad stole back the railroad from a bankrupt lessee?
- ... that G. R. Pantouw supported the Dutch puppet state of East Indonesia because he wanted to push the Netherlands into abandoning colonialism?
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