Zeeland must now choose

‘People have been flocking here from all over the country and all over the world, since as early as the seventeenth century. It was a region of pleasure gardens and country estates that offered a cornucopia of art treasures and landscape architecture,’ says Aad de Klerk, historical geographer who earned his PhD in 2003 with the thesis The Dutch landscape, the villages in Zeeland and the water on Walcheren. ‘And Zeeland is still beautiful. Middelburg resides in the top ten of historical cities in the Netherlands and is surrounded by a patchwork of various landscapes.

There is an old drawing in the Rijksmuseum collection, View of Middelburg by the Zeeland painter Johannes Goedaert (1630 – 1668). On it you can see the small-scale, mixed landscape of Walcheren with little hedges marking the plots. That is the Walcheren that is still there in its variety. This is also the Zeeland that writers and painters in the nineteenth century have seen passing by the windows of their train and the steam tram as they travelled through. Zeeland was connected to the whole world, and there was a daily ferry service to England, and a train line that went all the way to Russia. These artists, like Mondrian and Toorop in a later century, were following the lead of the wealthy classes from other parts of The Netherlands who their summers in Domburg to enjoy the Zeeland landscape. The people of Zeeland are aware of this storied history too. Many have an old map of Zeeland hanging on the wall at home.’

There is art everywhere, architect and urban planner Henk Hartzema has also noticed: ‘I’m always impressed that you will find a renowned art dealer in a relatively small town like Goes and that Middelburg has the Zeeuws Veilinghuis, and auction house that sells the most beautiful objects reflecting the rich history of the province. It is often art from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the era when Zeeland was one of the most prosperous regions in The Netherlands. People from all over the world came here to admire the landscape and the cities.’ Henk Hartzema has completed many landscape projects in Zeeland and is fascinated by the province. ‘When I drive across the concrete slabs of the Haringvlietdam, it always gives me the feeling of being on holiday. You break away from the Randstad and are immersed in the wide, open fields of Zeeland. It is the Netherlands in a nutshell, with polders, dikes, villages and churches, farms and lighthouses. It has this island quality, like the Wadden. The dikes here in Zeeland are particularly striking. Standing on top of them you get a panoramic view of the landscape with occasional a house punctuating the green expanses. It is a fabulous sight and, I dare to say, the only landscape in the Netherlands that has become more beautiful in the last fifty years. It’s a place where you are engulfed by something bigger. The majesty of the landscape takes you in and the enormous windmills, dikes and locks all amplify that feeling.’

The Zeeland landscape

Aad de Klerk himself, after years in the Randstad, has lived in Middelburg for decades and knows the Zeeland landscape through and through: ‘Especially the enormous diversity of the landscape always strikes me. On a large part of Walcheren, your view is always limited by the eternal horizon of the dunes, but everywhere else it is the dikes that mark the end of the human environment. These dikes act as growth rings in a landscape and going south from Goes you may come across twenty dikes. I also think of all the different landscapes of all the different smells. Samphire, for example, the salt-loving crop that traditionally grows here on the salt marshes, where the sea floods the land. The pile heads are also typical of Zeeland. The beaches are unthinkable without the single or double rows of wooden poles. And then there is the rich history of various types of agriculture. With grain, madder, fruit cultivation and – since the nineteenth century – sugar beet. You have the wide polders of Zeeuws-Vlaanderen and Noord-Beveland and the small-scale ones on Zuid-Beveland. Very varied and all that results in a variety of landscapes and also important differences in lifestyles that you can still find among the people of Zeeland to this day.’

When Hartzema thinks of the Zeeland landscape, he thinks of water and land: ‘I think of the few fishermen of Yerseke and see a small stretch of land, a massive dike and the sea behind it. I see the four seasons in one day and all the people shuffling through the landscape like passers-by. But I also see the increasing salinization as a result of sea level rise, which now also calls into question traditional arable farming and with it the close relationship between village centres and the surrounding open field. The experience of the seasons, the yield of diligent labour and the perception of divine presence gave their blessing to existence for centuries. But that is changing now. Increasing shortages of freshwater are a slow disaster that is unfolding in the Netherlands, especially here in the South-West Delta.’

Zeeland against Holland

‘Zeeland is not large in terms of numbers of residents. That was already the case in the past and even now there are only about 380 thousand people living in the province,’ says Hartzema. ‘In the past five centuries, it was the dominant Dutch regions that have outflanked the outlying regions and have indulged themselves there, including Zeeland. Now is the time for the people of Zeeland to stand up for themselves again, to be proud of their history and their landscape. The circumstances offer the opportunities for this. Climate change and sea level rise will have major consequences for Zeeland’s rivers and landscape. For the people of Zeeland, this means that they can show their muscles again and bridge new transitions of water and land. As with the Delta Works, human ability and engineering decisiveness will be stretched. And the Zeelanders can take that to their credit.’

De Klerk: ‘The people of Zeeland are faced with a choice: close the dikes and make them even higher, let some water through or expand them seaward with new islands off the coast. But they can move along, as has been done so often in history. Actually, just like the Drowned Land of Saeftinghe, which was once low, has now become the highest part of Zeeland because of all the silt – by moving along. Only Walcheren has remained fixed over the centuries due to the many millions that the water board has invested in the protection and securing of the area since the seventeenth century. That is why it is also called the Island with the Golden Edge that remains firmly in place despite the deep currents right next to it at Westkapelle and Zoutelande.’ Hartzema agrees: ‘Zeeland is changing and is mobile. It is known that in the five hundred years of history about 185 villages have been given up to the sea. Villages that no longer exist due to flood and flooding.’ De Klerk: ‘In the Middle Ages, Reimerswaal was still the third largest city in Zeeland. Only Middelburg and Zierikzee were larger. But the market, the town hall, the church and the monastery all disappeared under water in the sixteenth century due to storm surges. The remains can still be seen at low tide.’

Luctor et Emergo

Zeeland’s setbacks and resilience are in line with Zeeland’s motto Luctor et Emergo, Hartzema observes: ‘I associate that motto with the centuries-long, Protestant struggle against the elements. There is also something heroic in that cry. The people of Zeeland live on the clay and have a harder time than the people who live on the safe sands. That has also become part of the DNA. The Dutch Headwind Cycling Championships on an 8.5-kilometre-long Oosterscheldekering illustrates this. That only takes place in the event of a southwesterly storm with at least wind force 7.’ De Klerk: ‘The motto literally means ‘I struggle bravely and swim!’ and most people link that to the constant fight against the water. But it turns out to be a proverb that arose at the end of the Eighty Years’ War, so it is about the fight against the Spaniards, around the year 1600. But of course it also fits well with the fight with the water. Not only with the sea, but also with the inland waters. Hardly anyone remembers that until the thirties of the last century, Walcheren and Zuid-Beveland were flooded for many months every year because the rainwater could not be discharged. People have learned to live with it for centuries and they have never made anything big out of it, there are hardly any images of it. Again and again people died in a storm surge, but – that sentence keeps coming back in the chronicles – “shortly afterwards it was refreshed again”, it became fresh water again. The dike was closed again and the salt water had disappeared. People had to move on and not throw in the towel.’

Man proposes, God disposes

‘The Zeeland landscape always has to endure something,’ says De Klerk: ‘In addition to the storm surges and disasters that the people of Zeeland have been experiencing, they are now being hit by the salinization of the soil and mass tourism. Almost all waters in Zeeland have been tunneled and bridged in the last fifty years, which led to many tourists coming here to enjoy. In the meantime, many highly educated young people have disappeared and the original population is queuing up at the supermarket in a queue of tourists. Meanwhile, house prices continue to rise because people from outside the province like to buy the houses. Man proposes, but God disposes, is in the genes of many people of Zeeland, but perhaps they should stand up a little more against what happens to them.’ And how? De Klerk: ‘I find the interesting thing about Zeeland one layer on top of another. I would like us to continue to acknowledge and recognize the layers below from the top layer. Zeeland deserves that. In Walcheren, some redesigns have been carried out, but you can still recognize the higher creek ridges, with the villages, roads and farms on top and the low grassland to the side. Large roads and windmills make that story less recognizable. I argue that we should show in the landscape that Zeeland was once an island kingdom, a country from other sides. Not by cutting dams and having ferry services come back, but that we see again where the creeks are that separated the people who once ensured the diversity of the population. Then you recognize the Zeeland landscape again.’

Lots of little kingdoms

‘Especially because in the past the people of Zeeland were literally divided from each other in the past because of the water, it is difficult to work together,’ Hartzema thinks. ‘Each island has traditionally been its own little kingdom. But now is the time to stand up together. Because what the writer Leonard Ilja Pfeijffer writes about Venice also applies to Zeeland: that everything that is beautiful brings doom upon itself. The emptiness and openness and freedom of Zeeland is something that the people of Zeeland should want to protect before it is taken away from them.’ De Klerk: ‘The green-blue oasis is under threat and you can see that because the landscape hides nothing. It comes down to a common voice from the people of Zeeland. But then again, the Zeeland poet and writer J.C. van Schagen already wrote: “Whoever wants to deal with us, will have to learn some manoeuvring”.’

‘As in many other places in the Netherlands, it is often an organized irresponsibility here,’ says Hartzema. ‘Nowhere else than in Zeeland are there so many mini campsites, on Walcheren there are as many as 160. And every farmer will soon be allowed to put three wind turbines on his land. Here, too, the high-voltage pylons that they do not want in their backyards in Aerdenhout and Bloemendaal are being built.

The people of Zeeland say about themselves that they can’t choose, but now they have to. Their stubbornness will eventually ensure that they reclaim their own province. In its long history, Zeeland has always been confronted with circumstances that are much larger than mankind, such as ebb and flow, weather conditions, floods, sea level rise and the outflow of rivers. There is always something powerful that the inhabitants of Zeeland have always managed to deal with over the centuries. There is always a future.’