Curious, how does it smell? Living in an old dredged peat bog sounds like smell could be a challenge.

You're not allowed to live there officially, but some people do.

Are they connected to the sewer system? Or do they discharge their effluence into the lake?

I saw some photos with ladders from the water. Does people go swimming there, is the water clean?

So this is the Dutch equivalent of a cottage?

There is electricity now, but it's quite new. Before that ours used to run on solar + batteries, you don't want a noisy generator in the middle of a nature area. A holiday home doesn't need that much electricity, warm water and heating use gas.

Prices are typical for this side of the country.

I was gonna say the same about the mosquitos. Also, the mosquito-borne diseases in Europe are increasing and one definitely don't wanna catch dengue fever

Easily over a million for the ones without neighbors. The most expensive one was listed for 13 million.

These are holiday homes for wealthy elites in Amsterdam. You either go there straight from Amsterdam by helicopter or you have a chauffeur drive/boat you there. These people don’t drive themselves.

But probably not for long with non-primary real estate being taxed at 2.2% a year.

With UblockOrigin blocking all Javascript by default there was no cookie banner, just the article and photographs.

Isn’t that actually illegal under GDPR? There’s a reason all the other sites allow you to opt out and it’s not because they want to do that.

Water levels in this area are tightly managed by pumps. Also in normal times they pump water in and out to keep a specific level. All of this is lower than the Amsterdamrijnkanaal, so without pumps it would flood, water doesn't naturally flow out of this place only from evaporation.

With a boat, as far as I know the sides aren't good fishing spots. There is a website about it: https://www.vissenoploosdrecht.nl/fotos/

It is also a fantastic carbon sink.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/21/headway/peat-...

"Although peatlands make up just 3 percent of land on Earth, they store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests combined."

Nice it was historically just dug up and the leftovers turned into expensive holiday homes.

Most of Netherland used to be peat, but there's almost nothing left now. From about the 10th century onward, it's slowly all been turned into farmland or lakes. Sometimes both. This is the process that really created the country, both geographically and politically.

Anybody whose done any amount of gardening or has houseplants is probably familiar with peat. Though its harvest is destructive to the unique peat bog environments it forms

It is also used to give whisky a smokey taste.

It usually holds many times its solid weight in water. If you add load to it by building something on it (without designing around the ground conditions) it can compress to a fraction of its volume, resulting in ground settlements that can be very large.

Next, google "bog butter" to see one of their more interesting uses.

pre-industrial peoples in some parts of the world used this material extensively.. some still do

Can also be used to build a home. Up to 1940 that is how the lowest class in The Netherlands lived. Plaggenhutten, homes made out of peat, straw, manure.