Van Gogh

Van Gogh is the newest kind of Dutch national park and the newest but one on the list: designated on 14 October 2024, the first under the state's "new style" policy, and built by addition rather than enclosure. The same ministerial stroke that created it retired the old Nationaal Park De Loonse en Drunense Duinen, which now anchors the larger whole — so the park's beating heart remains the Brabant Sahara: over a thousand hectares of genuinely shifting inland sand between Tilburg and 's-Hertogenbosch, one of the biggest active drift-sands in western Europe, where medieval overgrazing let the cover blow and the dunes have been walking ever since, burying pine plantations on one edge and abandoning bleached forest floors on the other. From there the park runs east and south across Het Groene Woud — the mosaic of old broadleaf forest, wet heath and fen country between Den Bosch, Tilburg and Eindhoven, with the Kampina's heaths and the Oisterwijk woods-and-ponds at its core — and down the little river Dommel toward the city edges.

The name is a claim about landscape and biography at once. Vincent van Gogh was Brabant-born and Brabant-trained: the peasant interiors, the weavers, the pollard willows and sandy lanes of his first mature years were painted in and around Nuenen, at the park's eastern reach, and the potato-eaters' country he drew is recognizably this one — heath, poplar rows, smallholdings on poor sand. The park leans into that inheritance without fencing it: this is a designation over a lived-in landscape, villages, farms and all, on the theory that Brabant's nature survives by enlisting the working countryside around the reserves rather than retreating from it. It is the boldest institutional experiment among the Dutch parks, and its success will be measured in stream restorations and de-intensified field edges as much as in visitor numbers.

The set pieces, meanwhile, are proven classics. The Loonse en Drunense sands at dawn carry fresh fox and deer calligraphy and the country's best imitation of a desert; the Oisterwijkse Vennen chain their dark mirrors through pine; the Kampina keeps nightjars, both sundews and wet-heath silence a quarter hour from Boxtel station; and the Dommel, half-restored to its meanders, is relearning to flood its own meadows. Black woodpeckers, honey buzzards and, lately, wandering wolves stitch the pieces together at their own altitude.

What's worth knowing before you go

The park is a constellation, so pick a node: Oisterwijk (rail station, fens and forest at the door), Boxtel for the Kampina, Drunen or the Giersbergen hamlet for the great sands, and Nuenen — the Van Gogh Village Museum there is the essential biography stop. The sands demand the first or last hours of the day in summer: bare dune bakes, and the light is the whole show. June for nightjars and sundew on the Kampina, October for the drift-sand pines in colour and mist on the vennen. One orientation honesty: signage for the young park is still catching up to its ambition — navigate by the constituent reserves' names, which every Brabander knows, rather than by "Van Gogh", which some locals are still getting used to.