“When will we be there?”, asked my wife when we were driving in the middle of the WHS Beemster. A question, I quess, which kind of sums up the outstanding universal value of the site; if you don’t know about it you will have a hard time seeing and appreciating it.

Because the Beemster just looks like any other “polder”, a green flat meadow, I couldn’t really blame her. However, when it was created in the 17th century the Dutch made an effort to create the most ideal landscape ever made. It was the time of the Renaissance and old ideals about order, symmetry and harmony were pumped in the new land as to give it a feeling of harmony and proportion. Everything what you see nowadays is actually the result of quite some thinking.

The new land was diveded into squares of app. 900 meters and by doing so they created a chessboardpattern in the landscape. At the edges of the squares either a road or a ditch was built so products from the land could be transported easily. The trees along the road are there so they could protect the traveller against the weatherconditions and to emphasize the straight lines in the landscape. The farms on the new land had a square core and a pyramid roof etc and etc. It was all about mathematics in the polder. After the work was finished people as far away as Florence (the Renaissance city par excellance) came to see what was made from scratch.

When I explained this to my wife she couldn’t stop laughing. To her it still was the green flat meadow as just a few minutes before. All I could say was that she probably was so familiar with the surroundings that she wasn’t able to see the genius it contained. Best things in life are also the most simple I said but she could not be convinced.