Netherlands Geography, Climate & Nature

The Netherlands sits in the delta of the Rhine, the Meuse and the Scheldt, covers about 41,500 square kilometres, and is among the most densely populated countries in the world. It is also among the flattest: the highest point on the mainland, the Vaalserberg in the far south-east, reaches just 322 metres.

Below sea level

Roughly a quarter of the country lies below sea level and around half is less than a metre above it. The lowest point, near Rotterdam, is nearly seven metres down. Without the dikes, dunes and pumps, a large share of the Netherlands — including Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Schiphol airport — would be underwater.

Polders

Land has been reclaimed here since the medieval period, first by diking and draining with windmills and later with steam and electric pumps. The province of Flevoland, created between the 1950s and 1968, is the largest artificial island in the world and is home to several hundred thousand people on land that was sea within living memory.

The Delta Works

The North Sea flood of 1953 killed 1,836 people and prompted the largest flood defence project ever built: dams, sluices, locks and storm surge barriers closing off the south-western estuaries, with the Oosterscheldekering designed to stay open except when a surge is forecast.

The Wadden Sea

Along the northern coast, a vast intertidal system of mudflats, sandbanks and barrier islands shared with Germany and Denmark. It is UNESCO-listed and is one of the most important sites in the world for migratory birds.

Higher ground

The east has sandy heath and the Veluwe forest; the far south of Limburg has genuine hills, which Dutch cyclists treat with respect.

The Netherlands has a temperate maritime climate governed by the North Sea and the prevailing westerlies. The range is narrow, the weather is changeable, and the wind is a constant.

Mild and narrow

Winter averages 2 to 6°C, summer 17 to 22°C. Hard frost is occasional and snow uncommon and short-lived. Heatwaves above 35°C were once very rare and have become more frequent; the national record was set in 2019 and air conditioning is uncommon in older housing.

Rain

Around 800 millimetres a year, spread fairly evenly across all twelve months rather than concentrated in a season. It rains on roughly half the days of the year, usually lightly. The practical consequence is that Dutch people do not plan around rain — they cycle in it.

Wind

The country is flat, open and exposed, and the wind off the North Sea is relentless. It is why the windmills existed, why the offshore wind industry is large, and why cycling into a headwind on a flat road is harder work than a hill.

The sea and fog

Coastal areas are a degree or two milder in winter and cooler in summer than the interior. Sea fog rolls in over the dunes in spring and autumn, and inland river fog is common on still mornings.

Storm surges

Autumn and winter Atlantic storms combined with a high tide produce the surges the Delta Works were built for. The barriers close a handful of times a decade, and the system is designed against events far rarer than any yet recorded.

Light

Midsummer gives light until close to eleven at night; in December it is dark by half past four, which is more of an adjustment than the temperature.

The Netherlands is small, flat, densely populated and intensively farmed, which makes its ecology unusual: there is very little wilderness, and what matters here is mostly habitat that human water management created or maintains. The country's most important natural areas are wet, and nearly all of them exist in their present form because of a decision about drainage.

The Wadden Sea along the northern coast is the exception in scale. About ten thousand square kilometres of tidal flat, sandbank and barrier island shared with Germany and Denmark, it was inscribed by UNESCO in 2009 -- the Dutch and German parts together, with the Danish section added in 2014. Twice a day it drains almost completely and then refills, and that rhythm is the whole basis of its productivity.

Inland, the significant habitats are the polder wetlands, peat meadows and shallow lakes. The Oostvaardersplassen, fifty-six square kilometres of reedbed and open water in Flevoland, is the clearest case of the pattern: it is a polder drained from the sea in 1968 and earmarked for industry, which was colonised by water birds before anything was built on it and became a reserve instead.

The pressures are the ones a country this crowded would predict. Farming is intensive, the water table is managed for agriculture rather than for nature, and the drying of peat soils both releases carbon and lowers the ground. In the Wadden Sea the named threat is different: introduced species -- algae, plants and smaller organisms -- displacing what was there. Little of Dutch conservation is about leaving land alone, because there is almost none to leave; it is about deciding what the pumps are for.

Dutch wildlife is overwhelmingly birds, and the reason is the water. The coast sits on a migration route, and the tidal flats of the Wadden Sea feed hundreds of thousands of waders, ducks and geese either passing through or wintering. Autumn and winter, not summer, are when the country's wildlife is at its most visible -- which is the opposite of how most people plan a visit.

Harbour and grey seals breed on the Wadden sandbanks and are the large mammal most visitors actually see, hauled out on a bank at low tide. The same tidal rhythm supports wadlopen, the practice of walking out across the flats when the sea has gone, which is a guided activity rather than a casual one for the obvious reason.

The Oostvaardersplassen is the country's most argued-about wildlife site and worth understanding rather than simply visiting. Konik horses, red deer and Heck cattle were introduced to graze it open so that water birds would keep the habitat they had colonised. It worked ecologically and failed publicly: animals starved in the hard winter of 2005, and in the winter of 2017-18 almost 3,300 horses, deer and cattle died. A provincial commission reported in 2018 and the policy changed from rewilding to active management. The birds it was maintained for are still there -- white-tailed eagle, bittern, kingfisher, grey heron.

Two trends are worth knowing. Meadow birds are in trouble: the black-tailed godwit, a bird of exactly this kind of wet grassland, is classed as Near Threatened with a decline of around a quarter over three generations, and an important share of the European population now nests in arable fields rather than meadows. And wolves have returned and some are settling, after generations of absence -- a live and contested subject in a country with very little room.