Vaalserberg: Holland's Highest Mountain (& The Strange Story Of Neutral Moresnet)

hello I just got off the bus in the town of vows right on the border between Germany and the Netherlands and today we're going to take on the biggest challenge the greatest adventure the ultimate test in Dutch mountaineering it's time to climb the highest hill in Holland [Music] here in vaults we're in the extreme southeastern corner of the Netherlands squished right up next to Germany and Belgium and in a world coincidence we're not a million miles from where I filmed my videos about the Fenn barn and the giant hole of Hamburg even though all three are in different countries from here our goal is to conquer the mighty valsa burg mountain which is named after the town and towers above it at 322 metres above sea level Holland has a reputation for being completely flat but as you can see that could not be further from the truth having said that if you're from the north of the country you might be unprepared for these conditions so before we carry on let's go through the kit that you'll need if you want to come here and climb the mountain yourself that's coming up on screen now about five minutes into the climb we find these two signs having an argument with each other one of them points to the jury London punt or in English three country corner while the other gives the street name as fear grunts invade or for boarders way but if there are three countries how are there four borders well we'll worry about that later because the road is getting steeper and I mean this is genuinely a hill now and I'm so used to Holland being completely flat to the point that it's part of the identity of the place that it feels genuinely quite weird to see Dutch houses like these on a hill I mean you know not like yeah weird but sort of a ha type of weird anyway enough of that we've reached the edge of the town now and the real mountain starts here so cue the scenic montage [Music] [Applause] oh wait the montage finished already oh right sorry where were we um well I guess this is it we've reached the summit of the valsa bear I mean only the Netherlands could have a mountain that looked as flat as this on the top but this is the highest point in the country and there's the sign to prove it right now we are higher than anyone else in Holland and that is quite a thing to say but the fun doesn't end there as long as you can international geopolitics is fun because just over here is the famous dry London Pune this stone marks the exact point where the Netherlands Belgium and Germany all meet and the three borders are marked out on the ground wait three borders so why was that road called the four borders way well it turns out there used to be something else here and when I say here I mean here if we go back to the early 1800s the borders in the area looked more like this Napoleon has just been defeated and in 1815 the Congress of Vienna redraws the European map dividing up Napoleon's territories here between the newly formed kingdom of the Netherlands in the West and Prussia in the East however there was a bit of a tug-of-war over this little area because it contained a zinc mine that was very valuable as at the time it was one of only two zinc mines in the whole of Europe in the end the two countries agreed to share the area creating a new territory called neutral Mars net and if you're wondering why I'm saying Moseley when we can all clearly see it spelled Moors net that's because it was named after the french-speaking town of maahes neigh which was split in three by the new borders and things started to get very weird for the residents of the neutral area they were governed by both countries but citizens of neither the currency was the French franc instead of Dutch or Prussian and instead of Dutch with Russian law they used the Napoleonic Code basically it seems the best way of keeping the place neutral was to carry on with the French stuff they've got from Napoleon and just kind of pretend that nothing had happened and it kind of worked the territory existed for over a hundred years more than enough time to witness Belgium gaining independence from the Netherlands in 1830 which resulted in the creation of that mysterious missing fourth border neutral maahes near even managed to outlast the mine which exhausted its supply of zinc in 1885 and closed down taking with it the reason the territory existed in the first place various proposals were made to give the place a new heads on debt including making it a tax haven opening a casino and perhaps most optimistically of all turning it into the world's first Esperanto speaking state unfortunately all of that was rudely interrupted by World War one and when the Treaty of Versailles redrew the borders of Europe again neutral mines made disappeared from the map forever so back to today and there's a question I really want to ask at the tourist info if they weren't closed imagine there was something you could do that was legal in the Netherlands but illegal in Germany or Belgium I know it's not easy but just see if you can imagine something if you stood here like this and did that thing would you be committing a crime who exactly would arrest you and why is pillow fighting illegal in Germany anyway what did you think if you'd like to visit the valsa bear the three country corner and the former not quite country of Meissner it's all a short bus ride from the German city of Aachen or the Dutch city of Maastricht the climb to the top of the mountain requires three kilometres of not quite hiking anyway thanks for watching stay tuned for more adventures and following the 2010 dissolution of the Netherlands and

Channel: The Tim Traveller

Views: 453,434

Keywords: vaalserberg, vaals, mountain, peak, highest, highest point, holland, netherlands, moresnet, neutral moresnet, history, story

Id: rBZUQ_l3Q_o

Length: 6min 26sec (386 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 10 2019