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Nearly half of the Netherlands lives in three provinces
Welcome to Mapped — one dataset turned into one map, every week. This week we zoom inside a single country again: how the Netherlands’ 17.8 million people are split across its 12 provinces.
The Netherlands looks small and evenly built-up from a train window, so you’d be forgiven for thinking its people are spread out evenly too. They aren’t. Line the 12 provinces up by population and the country turns out to be wildly lopsided — most of it packed into a crescent along the west coast.
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What you’re looking at
Zuid-Holland tops the country at about 3.8 million — the dark green block on the west coast that holds both Rotterdam and The Hague. Noord-Holland (2.95M, with Amsterdam) sits just above it, and Noord-Brabant (2.63M) fills the south. Those three provinces alone are home to more than 9 million people.
Add Utrecht, the small but crowded province in the middle, and you get the story the map is really telling. The three coastal provinces — Zuid-Holland, Noord-Holland and Utrecht — hold nearly half the country’s people (about 46%) on just over a fifth of its land. That crescent is the Randstad, the ring of cities that functions as one giant metropolitan area.
Now look at the pale edges. Zeeland, in the south-west, is the emptiest province at about 391,000 people — barely a tenth of Zuid-Holland next door, a 9.7× gap inside a country you can cross by car in three hours. Drenthe, Flevoland and the northern provinces of Groningen and Friesland are almost as light.
Population isn’t the same as crowding, but here they point the same way: Zuid-Holland packs more than a thousand people into every square kilometre, while Drenthe and Zeeland hold fewer than two hundred.
The takeaway
“The Netherlands is densely populated” is true on average and misleading in detail. The country is really a very crowded coastal strip stitched to a quiet, green interior — and the map shows exactly where the line falls.
Make this map yourself
The whole map is one maproll URL — no shapefiles, no GIS software:
https://api.maproll.io/map.svg?scope=NL
&data=NL-ZH:3804906,NL-NH:2952622,NL-NB:2626210,NL-UT:1387643,NL-ZE:391124...
&theme=light&legendTitle=Inhabitants
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Source: population per province as of 1 January 2023, Statistics Netherlands (CBS), via the CBS “Regionale kerncijfers” tables. Land areas (used for the density figures) from the same CBS regional statistics. Next week on Mapped: subscribe below to get it first.