And that’s not even the oddest thing about the town. From the official Baarle-Hertog website:

It is unequivocally the most remarkable village in the world: 30 bits of Belgium and the Netherlands, interwoven with each other, together form this two country puzzle. Some kilometres north of the official state border between Belgium and the Netherlands, the Belgian municipality Baarle-Hertog nests itself as 22 loose puzzle pieces in the Dutch municipality Baarle-Nassau. The latter has on its turn 8 such puzzle pieces in Belgium, of which 7 in the Belgian puzzle pieces.

These puzzle pieces are called enclaves. All together, both Baarles are constituted of 30 enclaves: 22 Belgian enclaves, 1 Dutch enclave and 7 Dutch sub-enclaves. [...]

In medieval Europe, feudalism as the predecessor of the nation-states, was an all-round system of land exchange and granting, in exchange for protection or lordship. However, land owners always kept those lands to themselves from which they could raise tax money or other earnings. Due to this feudal system, territories became split up in a patchwork of parcels that belonged to different owners (dukes, counts, landlords, …).

In Baarle at that time, things were not different: parts of the territory were owned by the Dukes (“Hertog”) of Brabant (Baarle-Hertog) and others by the Lords of Breda and later the House of Nassau (Baarle-Nassau). After the Middle Ages however, the distinction between these various parcels remained unchanged throughout history.

Wikipedia adds that “The border is so complicated that there are some houses that are divided between the two countries. There was a time when according to Dutch laws restaurants had to close earlier. For some restaurants on the border it meant that the clients simply had to change their tables to the Belgian side.” The Financial Times (quoted at Bldgblog) reports that mothers select which room to give birth in according to what nationality they’d like their newborn to be. And in Bldgblog’s comments, a reader quotes from a “freely translated” Dutch news account:

The police found a body directly on the border in a old bank. Turned out to be a murdered woman. At first the belgium police was alerted, since the front of the building was in belgium. After closer inspection the part of the building the woman was found in, was on dutch soil.

I’d love to run an RPG set in a town like this. Curtsy: Kottke.org and Bldgblog.

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