The Belgian Town inside the Netherlands...

Baarle-Nassau-Hertog is a quiet and relaxed town located in a rather overlooked part of Northern Europe. The town is home to one of the most obscure international borders in the world-- and yeah, as a result of that, is located both in Belgium and the Netherlands. Just look at the images below and you'll get a better sense of the situation. Like always, I'll keep this one short and sweet.

The Belgian side of the town is known as Baarle-Hertog and the Dutch side as Baarle-Nassau; a casual line made up of white crosses runs across town and separates the two countries.

So how did this extraordinary situation come into being? To answer this we'll need to go back to the 12th century.

The History

In 1198, the Duke of Brabant(a province in the Netherlands) gave away most of his land in Baarle to the Count of Nassau(then the Lord of Breda). Some pieces of land although remained the property of the Brabants, which they used to collect taxes. In 1648, however, all of this changed due to the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia.

Under the treaty, the Nassau lands were allotted to the Northern part of Greater Netherlands( present-day Holland) and the Brabant lands were given to the Southern part(present-day Belgium). Come 1831, and Belgium gained its Independence from the Netherlands; the two nations, although, weren't able to formalize the borders around Baarle for more than a century owing to a bunch of major International crises ( uhuh--the world wars). Finally, in 1995, after months of contemplation, the current, unusually complicated International borders across Baarle were formally implemented.

Well...

This iconic scenario shows how sometimes even the most developed parts of the world can have a few radically 'out-of-the-box' features. It also forces us to question our standard beliefs about things: borders aren't just barbed wire fences running across miles of well-defined stretches, we now know that they can be something entirely different.

That's all for now, thank you so much for reading.

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