De Biesbosch

The Biesbosch has a birthday. On the night of 18–19 November 1421 the St. Elizabeth's flood broke the dikes of the Grote Waard, one of Holland's richest polders, and drowned dozens of villages; the land never came back. Where Rhine and Maas water met the tide over the drowned fields, an inland delta assembled itself — the "forest of rushes" the name records — and for five centuries people worked it rather than lived in it: cutting osier willow in the grienden for basketry and for the great sunken mattresses that armour Dutch dikes, running duck decoys, mowing reed. The freshwater tide was the engine of it all, two metres of rise and fall this far inland, a rarity on the planet.

The Delta Works nearly finished what the flood began. When the Haringvliet sluices closed in 1970 the tide collapsed to a few dozen centimetres overnight, the grienden lost their economics, and the willow cuts grew out into the closest thing the Netherlands has to jungle — dense, wet, creeper-hung willow forest laced with creeks. Into that jungle in 1988 came three pairs of reintroduced beavers, the country's first; the Biesbosch is now the beating heart of a national population in the thousands, and a dusk canoe past a lodge with the resident heaving itself under is the park's signature scene. The raptors followed the rewilding up the food chain: white-tailed eagles began breeding in 2012, ospreys in 2016 — both firsts for the Netherlands in the modern era, both now fixtures over the creeks. And the engineers, for once, gave water back: the Noordwaard polder was opened to the rivers in 2015 as room-for-the-river flood relief, adding a windswept new quarter of creeks and grazing marsh, while the Haringvliet gates have stood ajar since 2018 to let salmon and a shiver of tide back through.

For a wilderness it has an oddly clandestine history. In the last winter of the Second World War the front line froze along the Merwede with the Biesbosch as no-man's-water, and the line-crossers — young men in canoes — ferried intelligence, medicine and downed airmen between occupied and liberated Netherlands through these creeks in the dark. A monument at Werkendam remembers the ones the river kept.

What's worth knowing before you go

Three gateways, three characters: the Biesbosch MuseumEiland at Werkendam (the history, and the Noordwaard's new wilderness at its door), Drimmelen for boat hire into the Brabant half, and the Biesboschcentrum at Dordrecht for the Sliedrechtse Biesbosch — the last corner with a real tide, and the one reachable by city bus. The park is water-shaped: rent a canoe or an electric whisper boat, because the best of it — Gat van de Buisjes, the narrow willow creeks — is invisible from the banks. Beavers are a dusk-and-dawn appointment; May and June give nightingale song over the osiers, autumn brings kingfishers stacked along every creek. One practical honesty: summer weekends fill the main channels with motor cruisers — go early, go narrow, or go in October.