Qualla: Kleine Dommel

Kleine Dommel: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marczoutendijk, CC BY-SA 4.0. Vincent van Gogh painted this little brook in 1884, when he was still working in dark Brabant tones and had not yet seen the sun of Provence. He set up his easel at the Watermill at Kollen, the dam pooling the Kleine Dommel into a still mirror, and produced a canvas that the Noordbrabants Museum bought in 2017 for three million euros. The Kleine Dommel is not big. You could ford it in the right shoes. But it carries Brabant's whole twentieth-century relationship with water, from confident industrial straightening to humble ecological undoing.

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Image: Marczoutendijk | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kleine Dommel: Three Watermills and a Painter

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Casimir at Dutch Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Kleine Dommel rises in the south of North Brabant at the confluence of two smaller streams near Heeze Castle. It runs roughly north through Geldrop and on past Nuenen until it joins the Dommel proper west of Son. Along its short course, three old watermills still stand. The G...

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Image: Casimir at Dutch Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kleine Dommel: The Straightening of the Sixties

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kris Roderburg, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the 1960s and 70s, Dutch hydraulic engineering was at peak confidence. The Kleine Dommel in Geldrop, like brooks across the Netherlands, was straightened to move water faster off the land. North of the village, a kilometer of original streambed was abandoned and replaced with ...

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Image: Kris Roderburg | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kleine Dommel: Putting the Bends Back

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Minke Wagenaar from Amsterdam, NL, CC BY-SA 2.0. The 1995 near-disaster in the Dutch river delta, when the great rivers nearly overtopped their dikes and a quarter of a million people were evacuated, prompted a national rethink. Quick drainage upstream, it turned out, only made the lower rivers more dangerous. In Geldrop in 199...

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Image: Minke Wagenaar from Amsterdam, NL | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kleine Dommel: A Valley That Floods on Purpose

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit G.Th. Delemarre, CC BY-SA 4.0. Between Heeze Castle and the A67 motorway, the Kleine Dommel valley is about 3.6 kilometers long and only 400 to 500 meters wide, but it is deep enough that flooding it would not displace many people. So the Dutch waterboard built a dike along the southern side of the A67, rising...

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Image: G.Th. Delemarre | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kleine Dommel: Living Water Through Heath and Mill

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wammes Waggel, CC BY-SA 3.0. Most of the valley between Heeze and the motorway lies within the Natura 2000 reserve Strabrechtse Heide and Beuven, a survivor of the heathlands that once stretched unbroken from Nuenen to the Peel. East of the brook lies the Goorse Zeggen, a wet woods of birch and alder, and th...

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Image: Wammes Waggel | CC BY-SA 3.0