Schokland and Surroundings

The sea took Schokland, and the Dutch took it back. A peninsula that had become an island by the 15th century, it was evacuated in 1859 as the water pressed in; when the Zuider Zee was drained in the 1940s, the former island found itself standing in dry farmland. Traces of settlement here run back to prehistory, a symbol of the Netherlands' long duel with the sea — fittingly the country's first UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1995.