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Because more than a quarter of the country is below sea level. And why wouldn’t it then be the Netherlands, in the singular? Is that the Netherlands is divided into 12 provinces, which would be such countries, in the plural. Two of these provinces – called North and South Holland – ended up becoming synonymous with the entire region in some languages, such as Portuguese and Spanish.
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“This happened because these two provinces dominated the country’s history for a long time. There are the main ports and the ships that traveled abroad carried the name of the region with them”, says the Dutchman Martinus Feliz Mertens, advisor to the Embassy of the Netherlands in Brazil. More curious than the confusion over these terminologies is the struggle of the Dutch against the country’s ungrateful geography. Until the 14th century, part of what is now Holland was under water.
The introduction of windmills, a symbol of the country, brought the necessary technology to drain huge flooded areas – the large blades captured the energy of the wind and with it activated suction pumps. This, combined with the construction of dikes, allowed for an increase in habitable territory. In January 1953, the dykes that protected the southwest of the Netherlands broke after a violent storm, combined with high tides. About 150,000 hectares of land were flooded and 1,800 people died. The country then developed the Delta Plan, which reinforced and increased dikes, as well as building dams to protect the Netherlands from low altitude in relation to the sea.