Netherlands

Netherlands: capital Amsterdam, population 18.1M, area 41,850 km². The 71st most populous country, in Europe. Facts, map, neighbours and more.

About a quarter of the Netherlands lies below sea level, and most of that is polder land pumped dry since the fourteenth century. The Dutch Republic chartered the East India Company in 1602 and let ordinary citizens trade its shares, while Rembrandt, Vermeer and Van Leeuwenhoek all worked within a few days' travel of one another. After the flood of 1953 the country answered with the Delta Works, and today bicycles carry more than a quarter of every journey made here.

• The Dutch East India Company was chartered on 20 March 1602 and let any citizen of the Republic buy and resell its shares, which is how the Amsterdam Stock Exchange began.
• Tulip contracts peaked in February 1637, when a single Semper Augustus bulb changed hands for 10,000 guilders; some bulbs went for more than ten times a skilled artisan's yearly income.
• Windmills pumped the Beemster lake dry between 1609 and 1612, the first Dutch polder reclaimed from open water, and its grid of fields, roads and canals survives intact.
• On the night of 31 January 1953 a storm surge pushed the North Sea 5.6 metres above mean sea level, killing more than 2,000 people ashore and setting the Delta Works in motion.

• Rembrandt painted The Night Watch in 1642 at 363 by 437 centimetres and left about a hundred self-portraits, more than forty of them in oil, across his career.
• Johannes Vermeer set almost every picture in two small rooms of his Delft house; a nineteenth-century critic listed 66 works as his, but only 34 are accepted today.
• Vincent van Gogh made about 2,100 works in just over a decade, roughly 860 of them oil paintings, and most of those came in his final two years.
• Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was a Delft draper who ground his own single lenses and was the first to describe bacteria, sperm cells and red blood cells, reporting them in letters to the Royal Society.

• The Afsluitdijk, built between 1927 and 1932, runs 32 kilometres from North Holland to Friesland and turned the salt Zuiderzee inlet into the freshwater lake IJsselmeer.
• Queen Beatrix opened the nine-kilometre Oosterschelde barrier on 4 October 1986; its 65 concrete pillars carry 62 steel gates, each 42 metres wide, that stay open except in storms.
• Nineteen windmills built around 1740 still stand in the Alblasserwaard polder at Kinderdijk, the largest surviving cluster of old mills in the Netherlands and a World Heritage Site since 1997.
• Schiphol sits about 4.5 metres below sea level on the bed of the Haarlemmermeer, a lake dredged dry in the mid-1800s; 68.8 million passengers passed through it in 2025.

• Bicycles carry 27 per cent of all trips made in the Netherlands, rising to 38 per cent in Amsterdam and 46 per cent in Zwolle.
• The Dutch eat around 750,000 sandwiches of hagelslag a day, chocolate sprinkles shaken over buttered bread, and get through more than 14 million kilograms of them a year.
• The Elfstedentocht skates almost 200 kilometres past eleven Frisian cities, but only runs when natural ice reaches 15 centimetres everywhere on the route; it was last held in 1997.
• Sinterklaas brings presents on the evening of 5 December, the eve of Saint Nicholas's name day, and this Dutch figure is one of the sources of Santa Claus.

What is the capital of Netherlands?

The capital of Netherlands is Amsterdam.

What is the population of Netherlands?

Netherlands has about 18.1M people — the 71st most populous country in the world.

How big is Netherlands?

Netherlands covers 41,850 km², making it the 131st largest country by area.

Which region is Netherlands in?

Netherlands is in Western Europe, Europe.