Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau

Medieval landholdings

In 1198 Godfried van Schoten, lord of Breda, gave the land south of Breda to Count Hendrik I of Brabant, who handed it straight back as a fief. The count kept the inhabited, taxpaying pieces for himself, and they became Baarle-Hertog. The rest stayed under Breda, and after the Nassau family took Breda in 1404 it became Baarle-Nassau.^[3]

After the Peace of Münster in 1648, Breda and with it Baarle-Nassau went to the northern Netherlands. Baarle-Hertog, part of the barony of Turnhout, stayed with the southern Netherlands.^[3]

5,732 plots

When Belgium and the Netherlands described their border in the Treaty of Maastricht of 1843, they could not settle one line for the 50 km between border markers 214 and 215. Instead the treaty listed 5,732 plots of land and gave each one to one country or the other.^[3]

Two of those plots ended up before the International Court of Justice. A Communal Minute drawn up between 1836 and 1841 gave them to Baarle-Nassau, but the Descriptive Minute and map attached to the 1843 convention gave them to Baarle-Hertog. The Netherlands argued that the convention contained an error. On 20 June 1959 the Court ruled that the plots were Belgian.^[4]

On 26 April 1974 the two countries agreed at Turnhout that the lines on the ground between markers 214 and 215 were the official border. Afterwards a field south of Ulicoten turned up that belonged to neither. In 1995 it became the 22nd Belgian enclave, and the municipal boundaries were declared the state border.^[3]

Living on the line

The border runs criss-cross through roads, gardens and houses.^[1] A house belongs to the country its front door is in.^[5] At Loveren the border runs straight through a front door, so one house has two addresses: Loveren 2 in Belgium and Loveren 19 in the Netherlands.^[2]

Two Belgian enclaves, known as H1 and H2, touch at a single point, so four boundary lines meet there.^[3] Each village has its own mayor.^[6]

The arrangement mattered in 2020, when the two countries set different COVID-19 rules. Belgian cafés stayed shut while Dutch ones 50 metres away prepared to reopen, and Belgians were not allowed to shop across the border, even in the town centre.^[6] An art gallery split by the border had to close under Belgian law while the shop next door, on the Dutch side, stayed open.^[5]