Five Islands, One Tide — A Long Weekend on the Wadden

The ferry leaves Den Helder at twenty past the hour. By the time you have found a seat by the window and bought a coffee from the woman who has been pouring them since before you were born, the harbour is already behind you, and ahead lies the Marsdiep — the deep tidal channel between the mainland and Texel — and beyond it, a strip of pale land that looks impossibly low, impossibly long, and impossibly quiet against the grey-blue North Sea sky.

You are about to leave the Netherlands as most people understand it.

Ahead of you, strung out across two hundred kilometres of the country’s northern edge, sit five inhabited Dutch islands separated from the mainland by a tidal sea that — twice every twenty-four hours — drains away to nothing and floods back to full. The islands are quiet, low-lying, sand-built, dune-spined, seal-frequented and bird-rich. Two of them refuse private cars. One has a 17th-century lighthouse you can still climb. One hosts a ten-day arts festival every June that takes over the entire landscape. One was named, by national poll, the most beautiful landscape in the Netherlands. And the sea between them — the Waddenzee — is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the largest unbroken system of intertidal sand and mud flats on Earth.

This is the Wadden. The part of the Netherlands where the country quietly stops being itself.

What the Wadden Islands Are

The Wadden Islands — Waddeneilanden in Dutch, Skylge and similar in Frisian — are a 200-kilometre chain of barrier islands curving along the north coast of the Netherlands from North Holland up to the Ems estuary on the German border. Five of them are inhabited and accessible by passenger ferry from Dutch mainland ports: Texel (the largest, reached from Den Helder), Vlieland and Terschelling (both reached from Harlingen), Ameland (reached from Holwerd), and Schiermonnikoog (reached from Lauwersoog). Five further uninhabited islands — Rottumeroog, Rottumerplaat, Griend, Engelsmanplaat and Simonszand — sit between them, accessible only by guided wadlopen tide walk or by private boat.

Each island is, geologically speaking, a long thin strip of dune-stabilised sand running east-to-west, with a beach the length of its North Sea side, a soft “wadden” (mud and salt-marsh) edge on its sheltered south side, and a small inhabited polder strip in between. The west end of every island is busier — that is where the ferry lands, where the main village sits, where the bicycle hire is. The east end of every island is empty — bird reserve, salt marsh, sand spit, sky. You can walk for an afternoon and meet nobody. On Schiermonnikoog you can walk for an afternoon and meet nobody and the sand spit you are walking down has grown by another fifteen metres since the last time anyone measured it.

The islands have been continuously inhabited since the early medieval period. They were Frisian before they were Dutch, and in some places they still are — Terschelling and the Frisian-mainland islands of Ameland and Schiermonnikoog still teach West Frisian (Frysk) in primary schools, and you will hear the older island residents speaking a softer, vowel-rich dialect when they greet each other on the bicycle paths. The economy was, historically, whaling and herring and seafaring. By the late nineteenth century it was lifeboats and lighthouse-keeping. By the late twentieth century it was tourism, and now it is tourism plus a quiet renaissance of small-scale dairy, sheep and cranberry farming, plus — on Texel and Terschelling especially — a handful of seriously good restaurants run by people who left Amsterdam and have no intention of going back.

The five islands are not interchangeable. They feel, despite the geographic similarity, like five distinct small countries. What follows is the case for each.