Qualla: Delfzijl

Delfzijl: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Georges Simenon spent the winter of 1929 stuck in Delfzijl. His sailboat, the Ostrogoth, was being recaulked at the local shipyard, the weather was foul, and the young Belgian writer had nothing to do but pace the quays of a Dutch port city he had not planned to spend any time in. According to the story Simenon liked to tell afterward, it was here - in a dockside cafe, on a barge, somewhere along the Ems estuary - that a heavyset, pipe-smoking French police inspector first walked into his head. Maigret would go on to appear in seventy-five novels and twenty-eight short stories. Today a bronze Maigret stands on the Delfzijl waterfront, pipe in hand, looking out over the same gray harbor where Simenon waited out the cold.

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Delfzijl: Sluice of the Delf

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The name is a literal description of the place's purpose. Delf was a medieval canal connecting the small Fivel river to the larger Ems estuary; zijl, in old Dutch, is a sluice or water outlet. Delfzijl was, originally, just the sluice where that canal met the sea - a gate in the ...

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Delfzijl: Fortress on the Ems

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1580 the Dutch built a square earthwork sconce and a church at Delfzijl, and in 1591 expanded the works to a six-bastion fortress, just in time for Prince Maurice of Orange to arrive with a fleet of 150 ships and take the place from the Spanish in a combined Dutch and English ...

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Delfzijl: Simenon's Maigret

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By the time Simenon found himself stuck here in the winter of 1929 to 1930, Delfzijl was a working port, not a fortress. Simenon was twenty-six, already a prolific writer of cheap potboilers under various pseudonyms, and only just beginning to think about doing something more ser...

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Delfzijl: Chemiehaven and Beyond

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Modern Delfzijl is the fifth-largest seaport in the Netherlands and the largest in the country's northeast. The harbor handles aluminum, chemicals, and salt: the Aluminium Delfzijl smelter produces well over 100,000 tonnes of liquid aluminum a year, and the AkzoNobel chemical com...

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