Tiny sovereign Dutch neighborhoods in Belgian town

Geoff sez, "A reader emailed me about this amazingly weird town in Belgium where, due to how the town was divided back in the 12th century, parts of the village are actually now Dutch. In other words, you have this weird island-effect - check out the map - where pockets of the Netherlands exist within the larger matrix of a Belgian town. These sovereign pockets are only big enough to hold a few houses, though - and the houses differentiate themselves, nationalistically, by including coats of arms on their fronts. They even have separate postal services! It's like something straight out of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. What's more, because laws differ in the Dutch parts of the town, restaurants apparently used to close at different times - but in some cases this simply meant that you had to move to another table, thus crossing the national border. " Link (Thanks, Geoff)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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zuzu

If a plane crashed on the border between neighbourhoods in Baarle-Nassau, where would they bury the survivors?

Same place I had to bury the cat.
Honkytowner

What kind of journalism is this, where this fascinating town is not named? Nor is it pointed out that there is at least one other similar town across the border in the Netherlands, containing islands of Belgian territory.
Antinous

Journalism?
jeffery

Actually, this town’s situation is even more interesting than alluded to in the post – it’s a small town called Baarle-Nassau in the south of the Netherlands close to the Belgian border (google maps link here), and consists of small islands of Dutch land within a larger island of Belgian land, all completely surrounded by Dutch territory. Islands within islands, exclaves within an exclave. Strange, eh?

There are some really interesting houses that have been built there recently – here’s a phonecam pic I snapped of one last year. Isn’t that the coolest thatched roof you’ve ever seen?
joelf

Murder in the border town

26-year-old Belarussian woman was found dead in a former bank building straddling the border. Police detectives from the two countries each had to look for clues in their own half.
flipa

Islands within islands, exclaves within an exclave. Strange, eh?

I hope I’m remembering this more or less correctly:

Kosovo used to be an Albanian-majority province in Serbia. In Kosovo, there’s Northern Mitrovica, an area with a Serbian majority. In Northern Mitrovica, there’s an Albanian-majority neighbourhood. In that neighbourhood, there’s a Serbian-majority apartment block. In that apartment block, naturally, lives a single Albanian family.
monstrinho_do_biscoito

it’s like the enclaves of snowcrash and diamond age by neil stephenson
travelina

I like it that a woman in this town can decide what nationality she wants for her kid by giving birth in one room or another.
bwcbwc

@#23 – Since both Belgium and the Netherlands are part of the EU, what value is there in smuggling between the two?
Luc

The Belgian exclave within the Netherlands is called Baarle-Hertog. The Dutch town is called Baarle-Nassau, parts of which are exclaves within the Belgian exclave.

Once you get your mind around that, young grasshopper, you can move on to somewhat more complex issues with predominantly French-speaking enclaves on Dutch territory within Belgium, and all the politics that ensue.
minTphresh

are there ‘coffee shops’ in the dutch section?
owenblacker

Baarle-Nassau and Baarle-Hertog have fascinated me since I first read about them. I was particularly entertained to read that a house is deemed to be in whichever country hosts its front door â€” so put up taxes and people in border-straddling buildings just brick up their front doors and unbrick the one in the other country, thus changing nationality ;o)

There are quite a few entertaining sites about European exclaves (BÃ¼singen-am-Hochrhein, German within Switzerland, and Campione d’Italia, Italian within Switzerland, are both quite cool too). A couple of great links about Baarle, though:

* The Great Central European Border Expedition: Day 9 (Day 10 is also in Baarle)
* A page about a handful of the Baarle exclaves, including photos of some of the empty fields vitally important exclaves. And one of the world’s three bi-national quadripoints.
zonderling

Baarle-Nassau/Hertog is a smuggler’s walhalla. You can smuggle stuff without leaving your sofa. How cool is that?
EtaWat

I was in Baarle-Nassau a couple of years ago and we walked down a street where we switched country several times. Still I’m not gonna list Belgium as a country I’ve visited… just like I don’t list Andorra since I was 23 months old there and don’t remember a thing!

The door stuff as mentioned by Owenblacker is true, I wouldn’t want to be the tax collector or working at registrar, checking every year if people decided to switch from one country to other!
Anonymous

I actually discovered this town about 5 years ago while driving through it on a Sunday. The notable part was that nothing in the Netherlands seemed to be open until we got to this weird little place with people _everywhere_. It was only later when we looked at the map to find out what happened that we noticed it was part of both.

Didn’t get a chance to go back on a weekend in Belgium two weeks ago, but it’s a place I’d love to spend more time and check out!

Oh, Baarle-Nassau. Some day I will unlock your mysteries!
Anonymous

I think you have the key legend backwards
dr.hypercube

Strange Maps have done a bunch of posts on enclaves – one of the most impressive is Cooch Behar (not to be confused w/ Robt. Williams’ Cooch Cooty) featuring a counter-counter-enclave.
philentropist

Not as unusual, but something that’s always interested me, is that Detroit contains two smaller cities as seen here (Hamtramck, and Highland Park). It kind of grew around them when it took over the surrounding suburbs.
nprnncbl

@Flipa #6: did they have an adopted Serbian child? Who spoke Albanian? But with a smattering of Serbian words thrown in? Which were spoken with Albanian inflection? …
neurolux

@#14 Something very similar in Dallas, which grew around the neighboring suburbs of University Park (home of SMU) and (oddly enough) Highland Park. The two neighboring enclaves share a school system and other municipal services under the rubric Park Cities.
The Unusual Suspect

Like Detroit, the City of Montreal has the smaller municipalities of Westmount, Montreal West, Hampstead, CÃ´te Saint-Luc, Town of Mount Royal and Montreal Est embedded in it. This came about as the result of Montreal merging with all other municipalities on the Island of Montreal, only to have several of these former municipalities “demerge” via referendum a few years later.

And there are many examples of a francophone family living in an anglophone-majority apartment building in a francophone-majority neighbourhood in an anglophone-majority municipality in the francophone-majority province of Quebec in the anglophone-majority nation of Canada.

For that matter, Canada surrounds the Territorial Collectivity of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, a 250 square mile possession of France.
houbi

I was in Baarle-Hertog (the Belgian enclave) just today. Good thing the border police and customs have been abolished by Schengen-treaty and the EU, else I would’ve had to show my passport about 8 times or so.

An even stranger “enclave” in the strange country of Belgium is the Venn-bahn. A German railway that was later given to Belgium after WWI, forming 5 German islands alongside of the tiniest strip of Belgian land.
sakri

My Inlaws live in a commune outside Brussels called Overijse. The street they live on, is also the border of Overijse and another commune called Auderghem. I kid you not, all along the length of that street, half is nicely paved, the other half has potholes, because that’s the border and the communes apparently have “issues” collaborating with each other.
hagbard_c

I have inlaws living in Baarle-Nassau, the strangest thing is driving through the town. To amuse visitors and tourists the counsels have decided to display the border running through town using metal markers. On quite a lot of places the border runs almost (but not quite) through the center of the street. Quite a number of cars swerve of kilter with the road because drivers think they are following the center line of the road.
Jake Bullet

If a plane crashed on the border between neighbourhoods in Baarle-Nassau, where would they bury the survivors?
The Unusual Suspect

I spent time on the Akwasasne First Nations reserve, which overlays the confluence of New York State, Ontario and Quebec. All these jurisdictions have very different sales taxes, sin taxes, levies, tarifs etc. When the price of a commodity goes up in any one of these jurisdictions, you’d be surprised how much of that commodity gets walked from one end of the reserve to the other.

(@ #23: Baarle-Nassau/Hertog is a smuggler’s walhalla. You can smuggle stuff without leaving your sofa. How cool is that?)
Harro Willemsen

I can remember about 10 years ago, when I was playing pool in a bar in this town. The bar was build directly over the border between Belgium and Holland. They marked the border with a while line visible on the ground of the bar. On the dutch side of the bar you had to put in dutch coins to play the pool table, on the other side you had to put in Belgium coins.

harro
Antinous

Thus, Passport to Pimlico.