Qualla: Haarlemmermeer

Haarlemmermeer: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Globe-trotter, CC BY-SA 3.0. On the seventh of January, 1629, Frederick Henry of the Palatinate, son and heir of the deposed Winter King, tried to cross a lake in North Holland and drowned. The lake was called Haarlemmermeer. Two centuries later it did not exist anymore. Where Frederick Henry sank, planes now take off and land. Schiphol Airport, one of the busiest in Europe, sits roughly four meters below sea level on the floor of what used to be an inland sea. Three steam-driven pumping stations drained the water out between 1849 and 1852, and what emerged underneath was rich, dark, fertile clay. The pumping never stopped. It still has not stopped. Turn the engines off for a week and the lake comes back.

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Image: Globe-trotter | CC BY-SA 3.0

Haarlemmermeer: The Waterwolf

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lucas Hirschegger, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Dutch had a word for what was happening to their coast in the late medieval centuries: waterwolf. Lakes, hungry from storm tides and the slow shrinking of drained peat, ate at their edges and grew. In 1531 the Haarlemmermeer was only 26 square kilometers, one of four small la...

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Image: Lucas Hirschegger | CC BY-SA 3.0

Haarlemmermeer: Three Steam Engines and a Ring Canal

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tobi 87, CC BY-SA 3.0. Plans to drain the Haarlemmermeer had been proposed since the seventeenth century, most famously by the engineer Jan Adriaanszoon Leeghwater in 1641. He calculated that 160 windmills, working in shifts, could do it. He was right in principle, but no one wanted to pay. King Willem...

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Image: Tobi 87 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Haarlemmermeer: The Airport on the Lake Floor

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MartinD, CC BY-SA 3.0. Schiphol took its name from a sandbank in the old lake where, in 1573, the Sea Beggars are said to have wrecked Spanish ships during the Battle of Haarlemmermeer. Schip-hol, ship hole. In 1916 the Dutch military opened a small airfield there on the new polder. Today it is the sec...

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Image: MartinD | CC BY-SA 3.0

Haarlemmermeer: Living Below the Waterline

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Original: Ronald at Dutch Wikipedia Edit/crop: Cornischong at Luxembourgish Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Three Calatrava bridges, opened by Queen Beatrix in 2004 and named for stringed instruments, the Harp, the Cittern, and the Lute, span the Ringvaart with their white masts and stays. Within two years some of them showed corrosion and had to be repaired. The 40-meter Spotter's Hil...

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Image: Original: Ronald at Dutch Wikipedia Edit/crop: Cornischong at Luxembourgish Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0