Water infrastructure in the spotlight

Nowadays, Damme is a gastronomic little town where you can browse in small bookstores and enjoy a panoramic view from the church tower over the untouched polder landscape. The surrounding area is lovely for walking along quiet polder roads.

In the 13th century, the atmosphere was quite different. Damme was then the maritime gateway to Bruges, the most important trading city in Europe, and to the capital of the cloth industry, Ghent.

Damme owed its harbor function to its location at the Zwin. Now only a small piece of that Zwin remains, 15 km northeast of Damme. As you walk, you will discover how the Zwin was formed, how it provided a brief bloom for Damme, and why the little town gradually faded away.

You walk along mostly car-free, sometimes unpaved polder roads and alongside ‘sleeping’ dikes that now serve solely as roads. The idyllic polder landscape – formed in the Middle Ages and mapped as such by De Ferraris – was thoroughly cut through in the 19th century by three new canals: the Damse Vaart, the Leopold Canal, and the Schipdonk Canal. In Oostkerke, the tree-lined waterways intersect. This was done via siphons. After the walk, you will understand how ingenious these hydraulic engineering feats functioned.