We recently watched this interesting YouTube video about the complicated borders between Belgium and the Netherlands. Baarle-Hertog is a municipality of Belgium which consists of 24 separate exclaves inside the Netherlands. To add to the complexity, there are 7 enclaves of the Netherlands municipality of Baarle-Nassau contained within the exclaves.
For an excellent explanation of what exclaves and enclaves are and many more examples of them see this excellent YouTube video and its second part. We have created this KML file
of some of the more interesting places from those videos.
The aerial imagery in the Baarle-Nassau / Baarle-Hertog area is not quite good enough to see the border markings, but you can see them in Street View as well as flags marking which country is which.
This house is in both Belgium and the Netherlands. That line of ‘+’s running through the front door is the border. It has two addresses, 2 Loveren, Baarle-Hertog marked on the left side of the door, and 19 Loveren, Baarle-Nassau marked on the right. Google Earth was only able to find the Baarle-Nassau address.
Flags marking the border. The nearest flag is, we think, a flag of Flanders marking the Netherlands side of the border, then there is a Belgian flag on the Belgian side and then an EU flag for good measure. The purple flowers also mark the border, which zig-zags through the garden.
About Timothy Whitehead
Timothy has been using Google Earth since 2004 when it was still called Keyhole before it was renamed Google Earth in 2005 and has been a huge fan ever since. He is a programmer working for Red Wing Aerobatx and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.