We hope you’ve got your rods and bicycles ready, Anglers! Today, we’re arriving in Amsterdam, our latest Fishing Clash fishery, the capital and largest city of the Netherlands. A place connected to water like no other, mainly through geography, aquatic architecture, and relation to fishing itself! In today’s read, we’ll learn how exactly the Dutch are shaped by water and ponder how the surroundings that we create form us in turn.

The lands of nether

The Netherlands is one of the most water-shaped countries in the world: over 26% of its land lies below sea level, and nearly 60% is at risk of flooding from the sea or major rivers. Three of Europe’s great waterways – the Rhine, Meuse, and Scheldt – all run through the country, forming a water network of more than 6,000 kilometers of rivers and canals. To stay habitable, the Netherlands relies on an immense system of coastal barriers, elevated embankments, pumping stations, and engineered flood defenses, including a 32-kilometer-long (or about 20-mile-long) sea barrier that closed off the Zuiderzee and created today’s IJsselmeer lake. Given all of this, Amsterdam’s design, with its 165 canals and 1,700 bridges, perfectly exemplifies the country’s water-harnessing spirit.

Amsterdam literally means a dam in the river Amstel, a name that says more about the city’s origins than any statistic ever could. The very act of building that first dam was a declaration of intent toward a great challenge. An intent to settle with water, not despite it. From there, the city grew outward like ripples: first as a small community protected by wooden barriers, then as a flourishing trading hub, and finally as a modern metropolis perched on wooden piles driven deep into the soft, waterlogged soil. The city’s foundations are literally made of millions of wooden piles, all submerged, all part of the same national effort to manage water in a landscape where it’s constantly traveling to the sea.

A support in need of support

Usually, when we think of European cities built on water, Italian Venice first comes to mind, but the wooden piles of Amsterdam are a marvel of their own, as they’re driven through layers of peat and clay until they hit solid sand to become the foundations of the engineering wonder that we so eagerly visit as outsiders. These wooden piles don’t rot because they’re permanently submerged, and an oxygen-free environment has been preserving them for centuries.

However, Amsterdam’s wooden backbone requires support of its own. This is where the city’s picturesque canals come into play. Their role is far more than aesthetic charm or postcard appeal; they are the arteries that keep the city’s foundations alive. By maintaining stable water levels, the canals ensure that the wooden piles remain submerged, preventing the exposure to air that would make them dry out and decay. This way, the canals function as a protective buffer, a living water layer that keeps the city structurally sound. It’s a delicate equilibrium: the water supports the foundations, and the foundations support the city, where human life and culture can flourish. Without constant management of these waterways through locks, pumps, and meticulous monitoring, Amsterdam would slowly sink. The canals are thus a life-support system, a guardian of everything that resides above and below them.

Taken together, these details reveal a country where ingenuity is less a choice and more a way of living. The Dutch inhabit a landscape that requires constant awareness and problem-solving; it created a mindset rooted in practicality, experimentation, artistry, and collective effort. Amsterdam itself reflects that partnership with the environment perfectly. A city resting on submerged timber, steadied by a carefully tuned canal system, and sustained by generations who learned to read the water as closely as others read the land. But what is also fascinating is that this philosophy once traveled with the Dutch closer to the home of Fishing Clash: Poland.

Wherever you go, there you are

Once upon a time, the Dutch arrived in Poland, creating a nation locally called Olenders, a group who began settling in from the 16th century onward. They brought with them the same water-management knowledge that initially shaped their homeland, applying it to Poland’s flood-prone river valleys, especially along the Vistula and Warta. The Olenders built elevated homesteads, drainage channels, and field layouts designed to work with seasonal flooding rather than fighting them. Their presence reshaped entire regions into productive farmland and left a cultural imprint visible today in Poland’s landscape geometry and settlement patterns. It was the Dutch philosophy in action: read your environment, understand its rhythms, and build in harmony with forces that cannot be removed but can be guided.

This illustrates that human ingenuity, creativity, and gumption travel with us, regardless of where we go, and manifest themselves logically but also unexpectedly. Something impeccably summarized by the words attributed to Confucius and expanded by mindfulness teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn, “Wherever you go, there you are.” This means that we can’t escape from ourselves, for good and for bad. Our thoughts, emotions, and mindset make the journey with us to shape the environment we arrive in and, in turn, create the beauty we carried from our old homes to new ones. May we always have the courage to make that journey regardless of our destination, since home always seems to await our arrival, residing within us all the while.