Netherlands

The Netherlands is a country in Europe.

Its land is very flat. A lot of it is lower than the sea. Walls of earth called dikes keep the water out. The capital city is Amsterdam.

The Netherlands is in northwestern Europe. The North Sea lies to the north and west, Germany to the east and Belgium to the south. The name Netherlands means low-lying country, and it fits: more than half the land is no more than about 1 meter above sea level, and more than a quarter of it is below sea level.

The country is also called Holland, although Holland is really the name of two of its 12 provinces. Without its dunes and dikes, the most crowded part of the country would be flooded. About 18.2 million people lived in the Netherlands in 2026. Its capital is Amsterdam, but the government meets in The Hague.

The Netherlands is bounded by the North Sea to the north and west, Germany to the east and Belgium to the south. Britannica describes the most developed part of the country, more than half its area, as lying no higher than about 1 m above sea level, and more than a quarter of the total area as lying below it; without dunes and dikes, it would be inundated, largely by the sea and partly by the rivers. Holland (from Houtland, wooded land) is properly the name of two of the 12 provinces, Noord-Holland and Zuid-Holland.

Statistics Netherlands (CBS) counted 18,171,612 inhabitants at the end of August 2026. A parliamentary democracy under a constitutional monarch, the kingdom also includes Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, Saba, Sint Eustatius and Sint Maarten in the Lesser Antilles. Amsterdam is the capital and The Hague the seat of government.

Amsterdam has lots of canals.

Canals are rivers that people dig. Boats float on them. Old houses with pointed roofs stand along the water. At night, the lights shine on the canals.

Amsterdam, the capital, was built around a ring of canals dug at the end of the 1500s and in the 1600s. The canals were part of a plan to drain swampy land and make the city bigger, with gabled houses along the water. Today the canal district is a World Heritage Site.

Rotterdam, the second largest city, is a major European port. Its old city center was destroyed by bombing in World War II, and it was rebuilt. The Hague is where the government meets, and it is home to the International Court of Justice. Each spring, more than a million visitors come to see the flowers at Keukenhof.

Amsterdam's canal district, inscribed by UNESCO in 2010, was built as a new port city at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries: swampland was drained with canals in concentric arcs and the spaces between were filled in and built up with gabled houses. UNESCO calls it the largest and most homogeneous urban extension of its time and a model of town planning until the 19th century.

Rotterdam, the second largest city and a major European port, gained the New Waterway to the North Sea between 1866 and 1872; its city center and more than a third of the port were destroyed in World War II. The Hague, seat of government, hosts the International Court of Justice. Keukenhof, which opened as a spring flower park in 1950, now shows 7 million spring-flowering bulbs over eight weeks to about 1.4 million visitors a year. At Kinderdijk (UNESCO, 1997), 19 drainage mills, among them the 16 of De Nederwaard and De Overwaard built in 1738 and 1740, still work as fall-back pumps.

The Netherlands is very flat.

It has lots of lakes, rivers and canals. People turned wet land into dry fields. The weather is often cloudy, with rain all year.

The Netherlands is flat, with many lakes, rivers and canals. Over hundreds of years, people turned about 6,500 square kilometers of sea, lakes and marshes into dry land. These new pieces of land are called polders, and most are surrounded by dikes. At first people and horses did the draining, then windmills, and later steam and electric pumps.

The great rivers, the Rhine, Waal, Lek and Maas, flow across the middle of the country to the sea. The climate is mild, with gentle winters, cool summers and rain in every season. The land rises above about 105 meters only in the far southeast, where the Vaalserberg reaches 321 meters.

During the late Pleistocene the Scandinavian ice sheet covered the northern half of the Netherlands, leaving moraine; in the center and south the Rhine and Maas laid down thick silt and gravel. In the Holocene, clay settled in lagoons behind the coastal dunes and peat formed; where peat was washed or dug away, lakes appeared, many later reclaimed. About 6,500 km² is reclaimed land, mostly polders ringed by dikes, drained first by people and horses, then by windmills, steam and electric or diesel pumps. On polder land, buildings need rafts or concrete piles up to 20 m long.

In 1932 the Afsluitdijk, which Rijkswaterstaat gives as 32 km long, sealed off the Zuiderzee, creating the IJsselmeer and room for four polders of about 1,700 km². After the 1953 North Sea flood killed 1,836 people, the Delta Works dams, completed in 1986, shortened the coastline by 700 km. The climate is temperate: July averages about 17 °C, January about 2 °C, and rain averages about 790 mm a year.

Seals live in the Wadden Sea, along the coast.

Huge flocks of birds fly through the Netherlands. Deer and foxes live in the nature parks.

Along the north coast lies the Wadden Sea, the largest unbroken stretch of tidal sand and mud flats in the world. At low tide, the mud is uncovered. Seabirds, shellfish, harbor seals, gray seals and harbor porpoises all live there.

Huge numbers of birds pass through the Netherlands on their migrations, and some stay for the summer or the winter. There are many kinds of water birds, marsh birds and meadow birds. Larger mammals, such as roe deer, red deer, foxes and badgers, live mostly in nature reserves like the Hoge Veluwe National Park. Wild boars and beavers have been brought in or brought back in some places.

The Wadden Sea, a World Heritage Site since 2009 (extended in 2014) and now shared with Germany and Denmark, is the largest unbroken system of intertidal sand and mud flats in the world, with tidal channels, sea-grass meadows, mussel beds, salt marshes and dunes; UNESCO names the harbor seal, gray seal and harbor porpoise among its marine mammals. Britannica notes that seabirds and mollusks are found especially there and in the far southwest.

Migrating birds pass through in huge numbers, and waterbirds, marsh and pasture birds are numerous. Roe deer, red deer, foxes and badgers are mostly restricted to nature reserves such as the Naardermeer, the Hoge Veluwe National Park and the Oostvaardersplassen. Boars, beavers, fallow deer, mouflons and muskrats have been introduced or reintroduced locally. Some reptiles and amphibians are endangered, and many river fish have become scarce because of water pollution.

About 18 million people live in the Netherlands.

Most people speak Dutch. In Friesland, many people also speak Frisian. Many people ride bicycles. Some people eat pancakes and Gouda cheese.

About 18.2 million people lived in the Netherlands in 2026, and it is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Many live in the Randstad, a horseshoe of cities in the west that includes Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht. Dutch is spoken in the whole country, and in the northern province of Friesland people also speak their own language, Frisian.

Cycling is popular for getting to work, for fun and for sport, and at least half the population cycles. Dutch foods include filled pancakes, spice cookies called speculaas and hard cheeses such as Edam and Gouda, named after the towns where they began.

CBS counted 18,171,612 people at the end of August 2026; Britannica calls the Netherlands one of the world's most densely populated countries. In the west, the bulk of the population is concentrated in the Randstad, the horseshoe-shaped urban core of Rotterdam, The Hague, Leiden, Haarlem, Amsterdam, Hilversum and Utrecht. Dutch, a Germanic language, is spoken throughout; Frisian, spoken in Friesland, is closer to English than to Dutch or German. Immigrants have come for centuries, in the 20th century from Indonesia, the Moluccas and Suriname and later from Turkey and Morocco; in the early 21st century one-fifth of the population had been born abroad or had at least one foreign-born parent.

Britannica divides formal religious allegiance into three almost equal groups, Roman Catholics, Protestants and the nonreligious, with Muslims about 6 percent at the turn of the century. Cycling involves at least half the population. Dutch cuisine includes pannekoeken, oliebollen and speculaas, Edam and Gouda cheeses, and the Indonesian rijsttafel, a staple in larger cities. The Elfstedentocht ice-skating race through 11 Frisian cities is held only in winters with heavy ice.