Portal:Netherlands
Welcome to the Netherlands Portal
Welkom bij het Nederlandportaal!
The Netherlands, informally Holland, is a country located 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
Having achieved youthful success as a portrait painter, his later years were marked by personal tragedy and financial hardship. Yet his drawings and paintings were popular throughout his lifetime, his reputation as an artist remained high and for twenty years he taught nearly every important Dutch painter. Rembrandt's greatest creative triumphs are exemplified especially in his portraits of his contemporaries, self-portraits and illustrations of scenes from the Bible. The self-portraits form a unique and intimate biography, in which the artist surveyed himself without vanity and with the utmost sincerity.
Did you know (auto-generated)
- ... that the 1961 Indonesian census was the country's first since 1930 and the first since gaining independence from the Netherlands?
- ... that "Nahe wollt der Herr uns sein" (The Lord wanted to be close to us), first written in Dutch by Huub Oosterhuis in 1964, was included in the 1975 German hymnal Gotteslob?
- ... that the first landing during the Dutch invasion of Saint Helena was defeated by English settlers throwing rocks?
- ... that Sungai Selan hosted the first Catholic mission under the Dutch East Indies outside of Java?
- ... that the Dutch campaign OneLove inspired football captains to wear rainbow armbands at the 2020 and 2022 European Championships?
- ... that Kurnianingrat helped historian George McTurnan Kahin smuggle speeches by leaders of the Indonesian revolution from the Dutch?
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