Portal:Netherlands
Welcome to the Netherlands Portal
Welkom bij het Nederlandportaal!
The Netherlands, also informally known as 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 and three overseas special municipalities. European Netherlands has land borders with Germany to the east and with Belgium to the south, and a coastline to the north and west. It shares maritime borders with the United Kingdom, Germany, and Belgium in the North Sea. The official language is Dutch, with West Frisian as a secondary official language in the province of Friesland. Dutch, English, and Papiamento are official languages in the Caribbean territories. People from the Netherlands are referred to as Dutch.
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. A developed country, its mixed-market advanced economy is the 18th-largest in the world and has the 11th-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. The Netherlands is a founding member of the European Union, eurozone, G10, NATO, OECD, and World Trade Organization, 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 in March 2022 Sonja van den Ende was the only Dutch journalist to report from the Russian-occupied Donbas on the war in Ukraine?
- ... that Dutch East India Company officials considered the inhabitants of the Bungku Kingdom to be "the fiercest of all Malukan peoples"?
- ... that the works of both Dutch and indigenous Indonesian artists have been classified as Mooi Indië?
- ... that when Dutch ships reached China for the first time, seventeen out of twenty crew members were executed by the Portuguese?
- ... that people traveled from as far away as Australia and the Netherlands to stay at a house in Ohio?
- ... that the party leader of the new Dutch youth political party LEF – For the New Generation tattooed his party's program points on his forearm?
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