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The Netherlands is a small country with a long memory, and its twelve provinces are most of that memory: seven of them were sovereign states in the Dutch Republic, one was drained out of an inland sea within living memory, and the one everybody names the whole country after is two of them. This page is the full set, and the game asks you to put each name where it belongs, in English or the way it is written in Dutch.
A provincie is the tier between the national government and the municipality. Each has a directly elected parliament, the Provinciale Staten, an executive drawn from it, and a King's Commissioner appointed by the Crown rather than elected, sitting in a provincial capital. What they run is the middle scale of the country: the N roads, spatial planning, nature and water policy, and the supervision of the municipalities below them. The provincial elections carry a national weight out of proportion to any of that, because the people elected in them are the ones who then elect the Senate.
They are also the oldest political map the Netherlands has. Six of the seven provinces of the Dutch Republic are still on it under their own names, and Holland is on it twice: it was split into a northern and a southern half in 1840 and never rejoined, which is why the country's two best known cities sit in two different provinces. North Brabant and Limburg came in from the other direction, having been governed as conquered territory by the Republic rather than as members of it, and only became provinces in the nineteenth century.
Flevoland is the exception to all of it, and worth looking at before anything else on this map. It is the floor of the Zuiderzee: diked, pumped dry and farmed between 1942 and 1968, given its towns afterwards, and made a province in 1986. Nothing else in Europe is quite like it, and it is why the middle of the country looks drawn with a ruler.
For a photograph, the province is rarely written on anything. What gives it away is the ground itself: bilingual Frisian and Dutch signs in the north, ruled polder grids and young towns in the reclaimed middle, sandy heath and farms in the east, hills and a Catholic south in Limburg, water and dikes everywhere in the delta.
The traps are all names. Holland is two provinces and not the country, so a question asking for one of them is asking which half. Zeeland is the delta in the southwest and has nothing to do with New Zealand's spelling of it or with Zealand in Denmark. Friesland is the province and Fryslân is the same place in Frisian, which is the language on half the signs there and the province's official name in law. And Groningen and Utrecht are cities as well as provinces: two of the twelve share a name with their largest city, which makes the name easy and the boundary the actual question.
The name in brackets is the Dutch one, which is what the road sign, the weather forecast and the provincial government all use, and what the game shows if you turn on the local name in the start dialog. Eight of the twelve are the same word either way; the compass names translate, and Friesland is Fryslân.
The four groups are the landsdelen, which is the country's own quartering and what Statistics Netherlands publishes almost everything by. Each can be played on its own, though South is a two question drill and worth combining with something.
The youngest province in the country and the youngest land: the Noordoostpolder came dry in 1942 and the two Flevopolders in 1957 and 1968, all of it the bed of the Zuiderzee before the Afsluitdijk closed it off in 1932. It became a province in 1986, so it is younger than most people playing this. On the map it is the ruled shape in the middle with the lake all around it, reached only by bridges and dikes, and Urk, an island in the Zuiderzee until 1939, is now a bump on its northwestern edge.
The peninsula between the North Sea and the IJsselmeer, with Texel off the top of it and Amsterdam near the bottom. It was the northern half of the single province of Holland until 1840, which is the whole explanation for the name, and the county of Holland before that was the power that gave the country its nickname in most European languages. Note where the boundary is: Amsterdam is in this province and The Hague and Rotterdam are in the other one.
The northwestern province, the islands off its coast included, and the only one whose own language is a second official language of the country. Frisian is spoken by several hundred thousand people, the place name signs are bilingual, and since 2020 the province's name in law is the Frisian form, Fryslân. Turn on the local name in the start dialog and this is the one that changes most.
The long thin province in the southeast, pinched to a few kilometres wide in places between Belgium and Germany, and the only part of the Netherlands with hills worth the word: the country's highest point is at its southern tip, near where three borders meet. It joined the kingdom late and awkwardly, spent 1839 to 1866 simultaneously a Dutch province and a member of the German Confederation, and still sounds and eats differently from the rest of the country.
Twelve. Flevoland is the newest, created in 1986 out of land reclaimed from the Zuiderzee, and before that the country had eleven for nearly 150 years. The three Caribbean islands of Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba are part of the Netherlands too, but they are special municipalities rather than provinces and belong to no province, which is why they are not on this map.
Holland is two of the twelve provinces, North Holland and South Holland, and the Netherlands is the country. The county of Holland was the richest and most powerful part of the Dutch Republic, so foreigners took its name for the whole, and Dutch people still use Holland loosely for the same reason. Officially the country is Nederland, and since 2020 the government has stopped using Holland in its own branding.
It sits between the national government and the municipalities. Provinces run provincial roads, regional public transport concessions, spatial planning, nature and rural policy, and they supervise municipal finances. Each has a directly elected parliament called the Provinciale Staten, an executive of deputies drawn from it, and a King's Commissioner appointed by the Crown who chairs both.
Gelderland has the most land, about 5,000 square kilometres, with North Brabant just behind it. Friesland is larger still if you count the water it administers, since a slice of the IJsselmeer and the Wadden Sea belongs to it, though this map draws the water as water rather than as province. Utrecht is the smallest province by area and Zeeland has the fewest people, while South Holland has by far the most.
Because it was drawn before it existed. It is the drained bed of the Zuiderzee, an arm of the North Sea until the Afsluitdijk closed it off in 1932 and turned it into the freshwater IJsselmeer. The Noordoostpolder was pumped dry in 1942, Eastern Flevoland in 1957 and Southern Flevoland in 1968, each surrounded by a dike drawn as a straight line where nothing stood in the way, and the towns and farms were laid out on a grid afterwards.
Signs first. Friesland posts place names in Frisian as well as Dutch, which pins a photo to one province immediately. After that it is the landscape: dead flat polder in ruler straight blocks in Flevoland and the western peat lands, sandy heath and woodland in Drenthe, Overijssel and Gelderland, dunes and greenhouses along the coast of the two Hollands, islands and long bridges over estuaries in Zeeland, and actual hills only in southern Limburg. Number plates are no help here, unlike in Germany: Dutch plates carry no regional code at all.
The tier below this one is Netherlands Municipalities, the 342 gemeenten these twelve provinces are made of. More European maps in the same shape: Germany States, Poland Voivodeships, France Regions and Spain Provinces.
