What to expect when traveling to Holland? Tulips, windmills had been a symbol for decades when visiting the Netherlands. The travel and tourism industry in Holland was big business for The Netherlands.
Visitors’ arrival is so big to this EU kingdom, that the Netherlands has to start managing the number of visitors to keep the travel and tourism business sustainable for the Dutch people and the environment. It is one of the reason the Dutch tourist bureau is also known as Visit Holland
Visit Holland no longer wants to speak and promote “Holland“, but “the Netherlands”.
The Netherlands wants to get rid of the image of tulips, windmills, and cows, and to stimulate tourists to visit other parts of the country. The new tourism branding will no longer show the identifying tulip.
As of now for most foreigners “Holland” is just another name for the Netherlands, not limited to the two provinces in the western part in which the icons of Amsterdam, Delft and Kinderdijk happen to be located.
The “Netherlands” is a full synonym of “Low Countries”, which is used for present-day Netherlands and Belgium combined. The equivalent of “Low Countries” in other languages – such as the French “Pays-Bas” – is reserved for the Netherlands, with the exclusion of Belgium.
And to complicate it even further, the English “Dutch” for the inhabitants of the Netherlands and their language is also confusing. The Dutch equivalent “Duits”, similar to the German “Deutsch”, is used for the Germans.
It led to the misnomer “Pennsylvanian Dutch”, which were German and not Dutch. The Dutch in New York, on the other hand, were Dutch, and not Duits or Deutsch.
It all has to do with the history of these two countries. Having been one political entity until the present-day Netherlands got its independence (officially in 1648), it was part of the Spanish empire.
The independent republic got known as the “United Provinces” or the “United Netherlands”. The western provinces being the most important for trade and politics, “Holland” became the name for the country as a whole, like “England” is often used for the whole of Great Britain.
Only with their independence – in 1830 – Belgium got its present name. Before the brief period of reunification with the northern Netherlands in 1813, it was known as the “Spanish Netherlands”
Now the Netherlands no longer wants to be known as Holland.
Holland and water are inextricably linked. There is, of course, the famous coast, but behind it lies a fascinating landscape of ditches, waterways, canals, lakes, and rivers. Our windmills, pumping stations, polders, and dikes are world-famous. Nearly a third of our country lies below sea level. If Holland didn’t protect itself against the waters, half of Holland would be submerged. Making Holland a safe country was not easy: the Dutch had to fight for almost every square meter of land. Sometimes the people won, sometimes it was the sea. The large water engineering works of the past centuries, culminating in the Delta Works, are examples of our victories over the sea. How we manage our water and enjoy it can be seen and experienced in various places. The Western European nation, which includes the famous Dutch region, is dropping the nickname as part of a tourism rebranding effort designed to bring in more of the right kind of visitors.
Rather than being known for such things as Holland’s drug-culture capital Amsterdam, Netherlands government officials want to reinvent the country as a whole to promote its commerce, science, and arts, the Herald said.
The Netherlands’ Board of Tourism and Conventions also is scrapping its symbol featuring a tulip, the national flower, and the word “Holland” and replacing it with a new logo that has an orange tulip and the initials “NL.”
