Almere Travel Guide & History | A City Built Below Sea Level

Host 1: Imagine you're standing in the middle of this like bustling ultramodern European city. You know, glass and steel towers are just gleaming in the sun above you. Buses are gliding past on these strictly dedicated lanes and people are zipping around on a massive network of bicycles.

Host 2: Oh yeah. It's the very picture of 21st century urban efficiency.

Host 1: Exactly. But then you look over at a construction site right next to you and you realize the archaeologists working in the dirt. They aren't digging up old concrete foundations or like Roman pottery. They are meticulously unearthing a massive wooden 15th century shipwreck.

Host 2: Yeah. Just pulling a maritime ghost ship right out of the soil, sitting exactly where a modern city is thriving today.

Host 1: It's a visual that totally shatters your understanding of geography, right? Until you realize the foundational secret of this place. Because 65 years ago, the exact spot you're standing on where all those people are biking and drinking coffee. It was literally the bottom of the sea.

Host 2: It really is. I mean, it's arguably one of the most remarkable geographical and engineering transformations in modern human history. We are talking about physically altering the map of Europe here.

Host 1: So, today on our deep dive, we are exploring Almere. For those taking notes, it's spelled A L M E R E, but you pronounce it Almere. It's the Netherlands newest city located just a short trip across a body of water called the IJmeer directly east of Amsterdam.

Host 2: Right. And our goal today is to unpack exactly what makes this heavily engineered, meticulously planned city so incredibly special. We want to take you on a journey through the mechanics of its creation, its architecture, and its living culture.

Host 1: So you know exactly what you're looking at when you finally visit. Because making an entire sea disappear to reveal a blank canvas for human imagination, it's like a massive real life magic trick. And this city is currently sitting 2 to 5 meters below sea level

Host 2: and you will undoubtedly want to visit. So Almere is part of the Flevoland province which is a region of the Netherlands that was entirely reclaimed from the water. I mean none of this land existed a century ago

Host 1: which is just wild to think about.

Host 2: It is and the scale of the success is staggering. Today the municipality of Almere has a population of nearly 230,000 people. That makes it the eighth largest municipality in the entire country.

Host 1: Wow.

Host 2: Yeah. And yet as a functioning city. It's less than 50 years old.

Host 1: So to understand how a major urban center with hundreds of thousands of people exists right where trading ships used to sail and sank, we have to look at the monumental battle against the water. Because building a city wasn't actually the original objective, was it?

Host 2: Not at all. It was fundamentally just a survival strategy. To really grasp the causality here, we have to go back to 1886.

Host 1: Okay. Setting the scene,

Host 2: right? There was this ambitious visionary named Cornelis Lely who was a key figure in something called the Zuiderzee Association. Now the Zuiderzee was this massive shallow highly volatile saltwater inlet of the North Sea that reached deep into the heart of the Netherlands.

Host 1: And because the Netherlands is notoriously lowlying, having a volatile saltwater sea cutting right into your territory is, you know, an absolute geographic liability.

Host 2: Precisely. I mean, the Zuiderzee caused catastrophic, devastating floods on a terrifyingly regular basis. It was a constant existential threat. So Lely and the association developed a plan with two massive goals

Host 1: which were

Host 2: first neutralize the flooding of the Zuiderzee once and for all and second as a byproduct of that control create new farmland and housing to alleviate the pressures of a rapidly growing population.

Host 1: But to achieve that you can't just build a taller sea wall. You have to fundamentally re-engineer the hydrology of the entire region. How do you even begin to do that in the early 20th century? It required incredible engineering audacity honestly. So in 1932 they completed the first major phase which was the construction of the Afsluitdijk. It's this absolutely enormous dam over 20 m long that physically severed the Zuiderzee from the open north sea.

Host 2: So they essentially built a giant barricade across the mouth of the sea. But that just leaves you with a massive saltwater lake behind the dam, right?

Host 1: Initially yes. But over time the continuous flow of freshwater rivers feed into that trapped body of water gradually flushed the salt out. Through that process, they turned a violent saltwater sea into a calm freshwater lake, which they renamed the IJsselmeer.

Host 2: That is geography on a staggering scale. But turning a sea into a lake is just the prerequisite. Now you have a controlled lake, but you still need land. How do they actually execute the reclamation process to build what the Dutch call a polder?

Host 1: Think of the process as constructing a massive industrial scale reverse bathtub. First, they identified the specific section of the shallow lake they wanted to reclaim. Then they built a secondary watertight wall, a dyke, entirely encircling that perimeter.

Host 2: So they effectively put a plug in it.

Host 1: Exactly. So now you have a walled-off ring of water sitting in the middle of a larger lake. Fast forward to October 1967. They set up a work island called De Blocq van Kuffeler right on the edge of this ring.

Host 2: Okay, I think I see where this is going.

Host 1: From this island, they fired up four colossal diesel pumps. And instead of draining water out the bottom of our metaphorical bathtub, these pumps sucked the water up from inside the ring and violently threw it over the wall back into the surrounding lake.

Host 2: Just four pumps against millions of gallons of water. That sounds impossible.

Host 1: Well, they were highly specialized, incredibly powerful pumps, and they ran relentlessly day and night. Over the next 7 months, they pumped out 1 billion cubic meters of water. By 1968, the land known as Southern Flevoland was finally dry.

Host 2: But when we say dry, we aren't talking about like solid bedrock. You pump out a billion cubic meters of water and you're left with a massive flat expanse of wet, heavy marine clay just stretching out to the horizon. It's essentially an infinite landscape of mud.

Host 1: Yeah. A completely blank slate made of former seabed just waiting to be engineered.

Host 2: Which brings us to the human element. You have this brand new empty land and Amsterdam is facing a severe housing shortage. So, the government decides to plan a new town. But they originally approached this with the most utilitarian bureaucratic mindset imaginable.

Host 1: Oh, the naming process, right?

Host 2: Yeah. Do you know what they named it on the early planning sketches? It was literally Zuidweststad, which translates to Southwest City. Just a completely joyless placeholder name.

Host 1: Very functional, very Dutch,

Host 2: very. Fortunately, they eventually dug into the deep history of the region and renamed it Almere, which was the early medieval name for the inland lake that existed there long before it became the volatile Zuiderzee,

Host 1: which is much better.

Host 2: So much better. And then in 1976, the human experiment actually begins. The very first pioneers, the De Clerk family, were handed the keys to their new home in a district called Almere Haven.

Host 1: It requires a certain kind of psychological fortitude to be that family. Honestly, you are moving into a house built on soil that was literally underwater a decade prior, surrounded by vast flat emptiness. You just have to trust that the engineering will hold,

Host 2: right? But I have to push back a bit on the urban planning aspect. I mean, on paper, a completely blank slate sounds like a utopian dream for an architect. It's like playing the video game Sim City on a totally blank map. You can put the roads and the houses wherever you want without dealing with the friction of history.

Host 1: It is a unique opportunity. Yeah.

Host 2: But human beings usually crave organic growth. We'd like the messy layered history of older cities. When urban planners have unchecked freedom to build from scratch, the results are often sterile. Did Almere fall into that trap of being too perfectly planned?

Host 1: That is the central tension of any planned city. Right. And what's fascinating about Almere is how they actively tried to avoid that sterility because it was planned in the 1970s and 80s. The planners recognized the failures of rigid monolithic modernism.

Host 2: So they didn't just build endless concrete boxes.

Host 1: Exactly. They knew they didn't have to route traffic around ancient canals or preserve medieval squares. But they also knew they couldn't just build a grid. So they invited a diverse array of worldrenowned architects. People like Rem Koolhaas, René van Zuuk, and Herman Hertzberger.

Host 2: Wow. Some heavy hitters.

Host 1: Oh, absolutely. And they essentially instructed them to go wild and push the boundaries of urban design.

Host 2: So rather than one master architect dictating the entire aesthetic, they fractured the design to simulate organic variety. And the result is that Almere today functions as essentially an open air architecture museum.

Host 1: It really does. It operates on a different architectural logic entirely. If you take a virtual walk through the city center, which is known as Almere Stad or Almere Centrum, you see this immediately.

Host 2: Let's do the walkthrough. Yeah.

Host 1: So, starting right at the Almere Centrum train station, you aren't greeted by a traditional heavy European transit depot. The roof construction is highly unusual and modern. And from there, if you walk into the commercial core, you encounter a structure called the Citadel.

Host 2: To me, the Citadel is the ultimate example of the luxury of starting from scratch. Because in most historic cities, parking and transit are parasites. They eat up prime real estate. You either have sprawling surface lots or massive, ugly concrete garages that ruin the pedestrian flow.

Host 1: Exactly. Because you have to cram them into an 18th century street grid. But when you don't have pre-existing streets, you can think in three dimensions. The architects designed a Citadel by physically separating the machine of the city from the life of the city vertically.

Host 2: Okay. So, how does that work in practice?

Host 1: Well, all the parking infrastructure, the delivery routes, the transit connections, that all happens underneath the structure. It operates as a subterranean engine. Meanwhile, up on top, the humans get an uninterrupted pedestrian-friendly layered landscape with shops and residential areas.

Host 2: You separate the cars from the humans, which fundamentally changes how quiet and safe the shopping district feels. And right nearby, you have the Nieuwe Bibliotheek, the new library. It's a stunning community hub.

Host 1: Yeah. And the architecture truly shines when it interacts with the landscape. The center of the city is actually built around a central man-made lake called the Weerwater. When you walk down to the water's edge, you find a residential building called the Wave.

Host 2: Oh, I've seen pictures of this. It's wild.

Host 1: It is. The actual physical facade of the building undulates. The concrete and glass literally wave in and out, mimicking the water it sits adjacent to. And it isn't just mimicking the water. Some of the architecture is physically on it. Right next to the wave is the Kunstlinie. It's this breathtaking modern theater that looks like it's just hovering gracefully right over the surface of the lake.

Host 2: It is a stunning integration of structure and hydrology. And you know this experimental philosophy extends well beyond the city center. If you head over to the Regenboogbuurt, which translates to the rainbow neighborhood, you'll see a striking development known as the Rooie Donders,

Host 1: which look absolutely crazy in person.

Host 2: They do. They're these bold, bright red residential towers that heavily resemble massive industrial silos. And placed in stark contrast right near them are the tower houses, which are these bright yellow, perfectly cylindrical homes. The architects were clearly playing with color and aggressive geometry in a way that like historic preservation boards in older cities would never permit.

Host 1: Definitely not.

Host 2: But I have to point out a truly hilarious contradiction in this town's architectural history. We're talking about the ultimate modern forward-thinking metropolis. Everything is cutting edge. But if you go to the Almere Haven district, sitting prominently right by the A6 highway, there is Kasteel Almere.

Host 1: Ah, yes. The unfinished castle.

Host 2: It is so ironically funny. You engineer the most modern city in the world from the bottom of the sea. And then someone decides, you know what? This place really lacks a fake ancient medieval style castle.

Host 1: It's quite the contrast.

Host 2: And because the funding dried up, it's just sitting there unfinished like an abandoned movie set. It really questions the irony of building a fake ancient castle in the world's most modern city.

Host 1: It definitely highlights a bizarre human desire for historical anchoring. But stepping back from the buildings themselves, a city isn't just a collection of weird and wonderful structures. It's about how people interact with their environment.

Host 2: Right. The living culture.

Host 1: Exactly. And in Almere, that environment is overwhelmingly defined by two elements, nature and water, mostly green and blue everywhere you look.

Host 2: It's incredibly heavy on the water,

Host 1: which makes logical sense when you remember the city is essentially a giant inhabited drainage system. But the statistics still floored me. If you ask anyone to name a European city defined by water and bridges, they immediately say Venice.

Host 2: Sure, classic example.

Host 1: But Almere is roughly 50% water and it has over 800 bridges. That is double the amount of bridges in Venice.

Host 2: It's a staggering infrastructural reality.

Host 1: Because they reclaimed this land from a lake, water management is woven into the DNA of the city. Almere features 42 km of coastline and boasts nine different city beaches.

Host 2: Nine beaches inside a city limits completely changes the residential culture. How does that abundance of managed water play out in the daily life of the neighborhoods?

Host 1: Well, it allows for deeply unique residential concepts. For example, in the Duin district, the planners actually trucked in massive amounts of sand and constructed man-made coastal dunes up to 10 m high right on the beach.

Host 2: Wait, really? Just built huge dunes from scratch.

Host 1: Yeah. And they nestled the homes among them. So people literally live in an artificially constructed coastal dune landscape that operates within a major urban center.

Host 2: That is geographical manipulation at its finest. But the social experimentation goes even further in a district called Oosterwold. Right? Because the Netherlands is usually famous for highly rigid top-down urban planning. But Oosterwold is the exact opposite.

Host 1: Yes, Oosterwold is a massive experiment in do-it-yourself urban development. The government essentially handed plots of land over to the residents and told them to figure it out themselves.

Host 2: So, no top-down rules?

Host 1: Nope. The residents are responsible for routing their own roads, organizing their own energy solutions, managing their own water, and maintaining local agriculture. It's a bottom-up community-driven approach to infrastructure. It's like the ultimate neighborhood watch, but instead of looking out for burglars, you're collaborating on sewage management. It's fascinating. And speaking of the broader environment, we have to talk about the nature reserves.

Host 2: Oh, absolutely. The ecology here is incredible. Almere is surrounded by five distinct nature reserves which make up the New Land National Park

Host 1: and it's home to what they call Almere's big five wildlife, right?

Host 2: Yes. The big five. This includes red deer, Konik horses, which are these incredibly hardy semi-wild horses. Heck cattle, red foxes, and the true apex predator of the area, the white-tailed eagle.

Host 1: The idea of a massive white-tailed eagle soaring over a high-tech city that didn't even exist 50 years ago is just incredible. But let's ground this for the listener. If you are actually walking the streets of Almere, what does the living culture look like? Because a city this new obviously lacks a 200-year-old culinary tradition.

Host 2: That's true. Instead, Almere has fully embraced a modern, highly multicultural, and fast casual culinary identity. If you want a quick classic Dutch experience, you can hit up FEBO in the city center.

Host 1: Oh, yes. Everyone visiting the Netherlands has to experience a FEBO at least once. Getting a hot snack out of a glowing little glass vending machine built directly into a wall is a Dutch rite of passage.

Host 2: Exactly. Or for something heartier, you can grab local staples like Almere Fried Chicken or ribs at King of the Ribs. And if you need a caffeine break while you're architecture hunting, Mockamore is a highly recommended spot.

Host 1: And culturally, because they don't have a historic medieval town square, the festivals have adapted to utilize their unique geography, specifically the water. They host the Alluminous light art festival around the Weerwater Lake. The massive light installations reflect off the dark water, creating this incredible immersive experience.

Host 2: They also host huge Dvali festival and massive summer closing parties. Though, a quick practical tip for the listener, always check event dates and opening hours before you travel as they do change from year to year.

Host 1: Always good advice. So, hearing about all of this, the floating theaters, the Eagles, and the 800 bridges, it sounds like a remote utopia, but getting there and navigating it is incredibly easy. Thanks again to that blank slate planning.

Host 2: It could not be more accessible. Geographically, Almere is positioned right in the center of the country. If you are starting at Amsterdam Central Station, it is only a 20-minute train ride to Almere Centrum.

Host 1: 20 minutes? Yeah,

Host 2: that's nothing.

Host 1: Yeah. But a logistical tip, stick to the trains rather than buses for intercity travel. And pay attention to the specific type of train. If you want to go straight to the commercial core, catch an intercity train. These operate as expresses and usually only stop at Centrum.

Host 2: And if I want to explore the outer boroughs,

Host 1: then you take a sprinter train, which makes localized stops at all six of Almere's stations.

Host 2: Okay, so that gets me into the city. But if I'm visiting, do I need to rent a car to see all these spread-out boroughs and nature reserves?

Host 1: I strongly advise against a car. You absolutely do not need one. Almere has 440 km of dedicated bike paths.

Host 2: 440 km of pavement just for bikes. That is amazing.

Host 1: Yes. And because they didn't have to retrofit these paths into an old street grid, they are completely separated from car traffic. The city has entirely separate bus lanes, too, run by a local company called allGo, so the transit stays incredibly efficient. You should just rent a bike straight from the VVV Almere tourist office.

Host 2: Pedal power is definitely the way to go. Do you have any specific insider tips for when you're finally on that bike?

Host 1: I do. When you ride down to the Almere Haven district, you have to take the Podwalk audio tour. It's this fantastic resource that lets you listen to the firsthand stories of the pioneers who first settled this new land back in the 70s.

Host 2: Oh, that sounds amazing. Listening to the very first settlers talk about the muddy isolation of the early days while you're safely navigating a metropolis of nearly 230,000 people.

Host 1: It's a surreal juxtaposition for sure.

Host 2: So, let's bring all these threads together. If you are listening to this and mapping out your trip, I want to leave you with one lingering image to take away. Picture yourself eating a hot snack from a local bakery, pedaling a rented bike over one of 800 bridges. You look to your right and you see a towering wavy modern building. You look to your left and you see a white-tailed eagle soaring over a nature reserve.

Host 1: And the entire time you know you are safely biking several meters below sea level.

Host 2: Exactly.

Host 1: It's a profound realization.

Host 2: It is.

Host 1: But it also leaves you with a final thought to mull over long after you leave. Almere went from the bottom of the sea to a thriving green highly functional city of nearly 230,000 people in just 50 years,

Host 2: which is just a blink of an eye historically.

Host 1: Right. So, in an era where the world is grappling with climate change, rising sea levels, and crowded urban centers, what can this young Dutch city teach the rest of the world about engineering our own future?

Host 2: A brilliant and sobering thought to end on.