Polders and Dikes

March 6, 2011- Today on our second excursion, we looked at the drained lakes in Noord Holland, or “polders.”  While on the trip, we looked at a lot of open land used in a different way from the previous day.  

This land is different from the land that we saw yesterday since this was only used for pastures while the land yesterday is used for farming.  This is because the myriad amount of canals in the land.  Many dikes are necessary in this area of the Netherlands because all the land used to be underwater.  “Polders” are land that has been reclaimed from the sea.  Dikes and windmills are the primary ways to create a polder.  Because of this, we also stopped at a windmill museum and toured the inside of a windmill.  

This windmill was quite different from the windmill I toured earlier.  

This windmill was used to pump water to a higher elevation and used an Archimedes screw to do so.  A series of canals and windmills drained the water to create polders.  This also means that the land is below sea level and protected from the sea with dikes.  We drove on many dikes where the water level on one side was much higher than the pasture land on the other side.  This was an interesting sight to see and proved the knowledge and engineering of the Dutch people.  At the end of the trip we went to a beach on the North Sea.  Way off in the distance were located many modern day windmills used to create power due to the high winds out on the North sea.  

Although there are some of those kind of windmills in the United States, I have never seen so many before in my life!