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
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 directors of the Dutchess and Columbia Railroad stole back the railroad from a bankrupt lessee?
- ... that a former Dutch villa houses both the city council of Semarang, Indonesia, and the city's mayor?
- ... that the Dutch-built and Turkish-operated Birinci İnönü-class submarines were used to discreetly develop German U-boats?
- ... that G. R. Pantouw supported the Dutch puppet state of East Indonesia because he wanted to push the Netherlands into abandoning colonialism?
- ... that Jacob Christiaan Koningsberger, a biologist who catalogued the flora and fauna of Java, also served as the Dutch minister of the colonies?
- ... that Indonesian diplomat Abdullah Kamil was detained by Dutch, and later British, colonial authorities?
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