Qualla: Hoogstraten

Hoogstraten: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Franksavonturen, CC BY-SA 4.0. Look at a map of Belgium's northern edge and you will find a small bulge of Flanders pushing up into the Netherlands, almost surrounded on three sides by Dutch territory. That bulge is the old county of Hoogstraten, and at its heart stands a brick church whose tower has dominated this flat horizon since the 1500s. The streets feel Dutch, the accents lean Dutch, even fifteen percent of the people who live here are Dutch. But the postal codes start with 2 and the beer is poured Flemish-style, because here, against the geographic odds, the border holds.

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Image: Franksavonturen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hoogstraten: The Road That Built the Town

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Franksavonturen, CC BY-SA 4.0. Hoogstraten owes its existence and its name to a single straight line: the hoge straat, the high road that once connected Antwerp to 's-Hertogenbosch. It was a military highway, not a trade route. In the early Middle Ages little surplus moved between villages, and the travelers w...

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Image: Franksavonturen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hoogstraten: Brick That Outlasted Empires

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ReneeWrites, CC BY 4.0. By 1525 the wayside stop had ambitions. Count Antoon de Lalaing and his wife Elisabeth van Culemborg commissioned an enormous brick church, St. Catherine's, construction beginning on 18 November 1525, and a matching town hall next door in 1530. The church was consecrated in 1544,...

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Image: ReneeWrites | CC BY 4.0

Hoogstraten: The Longest Mutiny

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Scholte, CC BY-SA 4.0. Not all of Hoogstraten's history involved counts and church bells. Between September 1602 and May 1604, during the Eighty Years' War, soldiers of the Spanish Army of Flanders staged the longest mutiny in that long, miserable conflict, refusing to fight until they were paid. They ...

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Image: John Scholte | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hoogstraten: Thirty Thousand Tonnes of Strawberries

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Johan Bakker, CC BY-SA 4.0. Today the soldiers are gone and the strawberries have arrived. Veiling Hoogstraten, the town's auction house, is one of the largest in the Benelux, trading more than thirty thousand tonnes of strawberries every year, though tomatoes are actually the main crop by volume. In Februa...

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Image: Johan Bakker | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hoogstraten: An Almost-Dutch Belgian Town

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ad Meskens, CC BY-SA 4.0. Visitors arriving from Breda or Tilburg often do not realize they have crossed a border at all. The landscape stays flat, the brick keeps the same warm red, even the road signs use the same Dutch words. Then they see the price of beer drop, hear the softer southern Flemish vowels...

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Image: Ad Meskens | CC BY-SA 4.0