De Afsluitdijk: Why The Dutch Built A Motorway In The Sea

Hello and goedendag! I'm in the historic city of Alkmaar in Holland and if you just said the country's actually called the Netherlands, Holland is only a small part of it, then 10 points to you! And then minus 20 points because this actually is Holland. Anyway, Alkmaar seems like a great place but this video is about how I got here. By crossing the sea on a bus. This is Leeuwarden, the capital of Friesland province in the north of the Netherlands and not in Holland. You can catch many buses from this bus station but only one of them drives 32km across a sea. So we're going to get that one. And just to recap, this bus is going from here, Leeuwarden, to here, Alkmaar, via here, the sea. A one-way ticket costs €20 but I've shelled out an extra €1 for a day ticket so that I can get off and back on again. About 30 minutes into the journey there's surprising news for Swiss passengers as we turn off at the Dutch seaside village of Zurich. This is the last stop before we cross the sea and in most countries that would mean the bus now drives onto a ferry. But this is the Netherlands so instead the road just carries straight on across the water. This isn't a bridge, they literally just built a motorway in the sea. In fact, more accurately, what they built is called the Afsluitdijk. In English that translates as the shut-off dike and it's basically an extremely long dam that separates and shuts off the bay on the left from the North Sea on the right, behind that grassy bank. Construction began in 1927 with ships dumping a mixture of sand, silt, rocks and clay into the water in enormous quantities, eventually creating a 32km barrier that you could, for example, put a motorway on. The idea was that if you shut off the bay you could drain it and lower the level of the water. Why would you want to do that? Well, the productivity, shall we say, of Dutch people had been increasing and now there were lots of little Dutch people and the population was getting bigger. Normally this would mean cramming more people into the same space but a Dutch politician called Cornelis Lely came up with a brilliant idea. Why don't we make more space? It was such a brilliant idea that there's now a statue of him here standing majestically looking out over the waves next to a bin. So here's how it worked. Since much of the bay was very shallow you only needed to drop the water level by a few metres to create a whole load of new land for housing and farming. These three huge areas including all the cities and villages that stand on them now didn't exist before the Afsluitdijk. They're what's called polders. The Dutch had been draining lakes and creating polders for years. This was just the same thing on a much bigger scale. The project took six years to complete with between four and five thousand people working on it every day and here in the middle of the dike there's a monument to the workers marking the spot where they closed off the final gap. But more interestingly for me right now there's also a little cafe here which serves Frisian specialities such as Slagers gehaktbal with pindersaus and frietjes. Well I'm sold. And I'm pretty sure I burned off most of the calories straight afterwards by climbing the observation tower and hauling this door open. Up here you can see the almost surreal sight of the motorway stretching into nothingness in both directions. And it gives you a sense of what an incredible piece of engineering this really is. It is however an 80 year old piece of engineering now and like many 80 year olds it's in danger of becoming a little bit leaky. A four-year program of reinforcement has begun which will replace the outer cladding of the dike while widening the body and raising it by two meters. This will protect it from rising sea levels in the future allowing it to protect the thousands of Dutch people who live, work and catch buses on land that simply wouldn't be there without the Afsluitdijk. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed the video please do whack a like on it or leave a comment. Subscribe to the channel if you're new around here and I will see you soon.