Unusual border, Baarle-Nassau and Baarle-Hertog Bashny.Net

Baarle-Nassau and Baarle-Hertog — two municipalities that divide the town Baarle on the border between the Netherlands and Belgium into two parts. Nassau is located in southern Netherlands in the North Brabant province, and Hertog located in the Belgian province of Antwerp. Both cities have a common border, but this border is not straight, not even bent.









Instead, there are 26 separate parcels of land – a small part of Belgium and the Netherlands, scattered around Baarle. Is the main part called Zondereigen, located North of the Belgian town of Merksplas are within, and 22 Belgian exclave in the Netherlands and three other pieces on the Dutch-Belgian border. In the largest Belgian exclave there are also six Dutch exclaves. All this can be confusing, sometimes even the locals can't quite understand all these intricacies of the border.





The border is marked with white crosses on the pavement and metal marks on the road, painting zigzags across the city, not taking into account buildings, gardens and streets. One line goes through the gift shop and out the far end of the supermarket. A lot of houses bisected by the border. Thus, the nationality of each household determined the location of his front door.





Cities attract lot of tourists. For many years the shops in Belgium was open on Sundays, and the Netherlands closed. Taxes in Belgium and the Netherlands also differ, so that you can go shopping between the two tax regimes on a single street. There was a time when in accordance with the laws of the Netherlands, the restaurants had to close earlier. For some restaurants on the border it meant that the clients simply had to move to the Belgian side. With exit from the European Union, however, disappeared some of these differences.

 








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