SCHOKLAND "ISLAND"

The highway keeps going on an almost perfect flatland; the same once you leave it and turn right, the same again once you turn right again into a small country road. Then suddenly you notice a very small hill, a higher place your eye would not catch everywhere else but here; on the hill you note some well maintained ancient houses and especially a church. A small museum explains the island's way-of-life and constraints and there is also the old port and dyke protections. This was Schokland Island and is today Schokland "Island".
Let me explain: the place was a very small densely populated island in the Zuiderzee, or Zuider sea, inhabited for centuries by fishermen' families, till the tides increases forced them, poorest of the poor at the time I presume, to complete evacuation. The well known ingenuity of the Dutch people led to the total reclamation of all this area by the 40's of the XXth century, with the new region, to be called Flevoland, adding a reasonable increase to the land size of the country. Proud of its achievements in controlling water and nature, Netherlands proposed and UNESCO endorsed Schokland as its first WH site, symbolising the "never-ending struggle between man and the sea".