What Holland is famous for.

When toursists arrive for the first time in The Netherlands, windwill is what they look for.

This photo was taken last April in Kinderdijk. Kinderdijk is the only place in the world where such an amount of windmills can be found on such a small area. The 19 windmills of Kinderdijk were added to the Unesco World Treasure list in 1997 and have been functional up to the 1950′s. The 19 windmills Can be divided in 4 groups:

• 8 mills of the Nederwaard built in 1738
• 8 mills of the Overwaard built in 1740
• 2 mills of the polder Nieuw-Lekkerland dating from 1761
• 1 mill of the polder Blokweer approximately built in 1521 (burned down in august 1997 and being rebuilt at the moment)

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Because large parts of the Netherlands are reclaimed parts of water, about 70% of the country is below sea level. The impact which this has on the dutch drainage system is enormous. The draining of the country doesn’t take place the natural way, this causes that all the water from rain which falls on the country stays here. So in order to prevent the dutch inhabitants from drowning a large drainage system was formed.

For instance, the drainage system of the Alblasserwaard consist of three level system.

The Alblasserwaard is divided in several sections, called polders which means literally “a piece of land below sea level surrounded by a dike”. Every polder used to have its own windmill which pumped the water one level up, into the so called boezem.

The boezem water is collected at Kinderdijk where it will be pumped up another level by each of the 16 windmills. The water is pumped up into a reservoir.

The water stays in the reservoir until the level meets the average high tide of the river, then the water is discarded onto the river lek which takes it via Rotterdam to the sea. ~ source