Not sure where you are? Look down! (Jack Soley/Wikimedia Commons)
Disclaimer: While this article is based on geographical facts, it is also crosses random borders of satire.
The town of Baarle sits on the border between Belgium and the Netherlands, splitting it into two tiny city-states: Baarle-Hertog (the Belgian side) and Baarle-Nassau (the Dutch side). Even the town hall is bisected.
Baarle sometimes describes itself as “Europe in Miniature”—but don’t be misled. Much to our chagrin, we found it is not a miniaturized town to be squealed over, like the Dutch tourist attraction Madurodam, featuring tiny models of Schiphol airport, Amsterdam’s imposing Rijksmuseum, and tulip fields with windmills to scale, in the Hague (which this reporter has visited and squealed literally over, as it is quite small and low to the ground).
We will stay mad(urodam). (Willem Nabuurs/Wikimedia Commons)
Anyway, they mean “Europe in Miniature” metaphorically—as in, they squabble a lot. This makes sense once you learn that the border is not a straight line running through the center of town, but rather some hard-fought, haphazard divides that create a geographic archipelago of Belgian enclaves (there are sixteen) within Netherlands territory—and seven of those contain Dutch “islands” within them.
To visit every single enclave, you’d need to cross the border no fewer than 60 times without leaving town. We are definitely not doing that—we’re exhausted just from reading the map and aren’t positive that we are not having an Inception moment.
A town within a town within a town? (Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons)
Belgium became independent from the Netherlands in 1830, but the border situation in Baarle wasn’t made official until 1995. Each “side” has its own mayor, school system, town council, police station (two stations in the same office building!), and church—though in 2010, the two towns did decide to share a fire department, to the dismay of very fine arsonists on both sides, we’re sure.
In town, the border is demarcated by a line of + signs with “B” on one side and “NL” on the other. Houses show the applicable country flag on their address plaques, which is determined by where the front door of the building is—some residents have even moved their doors to be on the less-restrictive Belgian side. One house has both flags and different numbers, because that is exactly where the border hits.
That's it on the right. We are begging you to just send us a Google pin. (SPotter2/Wikimedia Commons)
Belgian shops have to close on Sundays, but Dutch shops don’t; though French is the lingua franca in the Belgian schools, most of the town’s residents speak Dutch at home; fireworks are legal on the Belgian side, but not the Dutch. We would like to take this opportunity to thank both town councils for the clear signage because we would definitely need reminders at all times to avoid breaking any laws.
Many buildings, not just the town hall, have sides in different countries—so your neighbor down the hall might actually live in a different country. This can be turned to a resident or owner’s advantage. Once, a bank was purposely built on top of the border so that when the tax inspector for one country visited, all paperwork could be moved across the room… to the other country. It’s almost too easy! (It is too easy—it’s tax fraud.)
Happily, residents say that for the most part, they all get along just fine (soccer games aside) and we will admit… we kind of want to go, but only if we go to Madurodam on the way there.
