A powerful symbol of the Dutch battle with the sea and a must see for any tourist coming to the Netherlands are the Dutch dykes. Nearly 50% of the Netherlands is protected from flooding by dykes and dams, making it a true part of the Dutch landscape.
The modern dyke in the Netherlands first arrived in the 19th Century. The Harlemmermeer (Harlem Lake) used to be an area covered in peat- the peat was removed to use as fuel and over time a lake formed. Over time the lake grew larger and larger and began to threaten the city of Amsterdam. The Dutch engineers decided to pump the lake dry - the bonus being they could also use the drained land for farming. Of course the lake would over time fill up again. The Dutch solved this problem by building a wall or dyke around the lake with a canal just next to it. Windmills were put in to use to pump the water out of the former lake into the canal, which lead via other canals and rivers to the sea. The dry lake bed is called a polder.
This art of creating polders was refined and perfected over the following decades. In the 1950s, the Dutch took on the South Sea (Zuiderzee). The South Sea was a cause of many floods and it was decided to seal the entire sea off by building a 70km long dyke through the middle of the sea. The South Sea became a lake, the Ijsselmeer, which changed the area from a salt water sea to a fresh water lake.
The Netherlands appetite for ever more land for argicultural use meant they took the Ijsselmeer a step further building new dykes and draining the land behind it completely creating an entirely new area of dry land. This area is truely massive. Indeed, it alone formed a new province called Flevoland - one of the largest polders anywhere in the world.
The dykes built to protect the polders and keep the water from flowing into them have to be quite high, due to storms. Over time, year after year, more land has been reclaimed in the same areas extending already existing polders. This means that more dykes have to be built, so in some parts of the Netherlands there are many dykes lined up, one behind the other. The dyke closest to the sea is called the wakende dijk (guarding dyke), the one after that is the slapende dijk (sleeping dyke) and next ones are romantically called the dromende dijken (dreaming dykes).
In addition to protecting polders, dykes are also built adjacent to rivers. The rivers, having to flow to the sea without spilling in to the surrounding areas, are always above sea level. Due to a lot of the Netherlands being below sea level, these dykes running alongside the rivers stop them flooding the country. Usually at rivers there are two dykes behind each other - the dyke closest to the river is a summer dyke and the one behind it and further away from the river is a winter dyke. In the summer there is land all the way to the summer dyke. In the winter the summer dyke is under water and the winter dyke stops the water. With this method there is more ground available in the summer time for use as grazing areas for animal. This extra ground in the summer is called Uiterwaarden.
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