Geography
A quarter of the Netherlands sits below sea level, and it's on purpose
Around 26% of the Netherlands lies below mean sea level, and without its dikes, dunes and pumping stations roughly two-thirds of the country would flood at high tide. Much of that land isn't a natural coastline at all: it was deliberately drained and reclaimed from the sea over the last thousand years as artificial polders, land the Dutch built rather than simply inherited.