The Netherlands has 21 national parks covering 237,000+ hectares — but they are not empty wilderness. By spatially joining 11.4 million BAG building footprints against the park boundaries, we find 70,789 buildings standing inside park lines. Most are in two parks. The rest are nearly empty.
The story of buildings in Dutch national parks is dominated by two: Drentsche Aa in Drenthe (37,270 buildings) and the new Van Gogh National Park in North Brabant (25,126 buildings). Together that's 88% of all buildings in any Dutch park. Both are inhabited cultural landscapes — esdorpen, farmsteads, hamlets — designated as parks precisely because their human-made structure is part of the natural heritage.
Compare that to De Hoge Veluwe (47 buildings on 5,104 ha) or Schiermonnikoog (31 buildings on 6,838 ha) — these are wilder, with strict access limits. De Groote Peel has just 5 buildings across its 1,314 hectares.
Buildings per hectare. By far the most populated park — entire villages like Anloo, Gasteren, and Schipborg sit within its boundaries.
Buildings per hectare. The country's iconic conservation park: forests, heathland, the Kröller-Müller Museum, and almost nothing else.
Total buildings. A protected raised-bog wetland that is essentially uninhabited.
Each park has its own building character. Drentsche Aa is dominated by residential and outbuildings — a working agricultural landscape. Van Gogh shows more mixed-use. Smaller parks like Utrechtse Heuvelrug have a high share of lodging (logiesfunctie) — hotels, B&Bs, recreation parks tucked into the woods.
Older than you might expect. 1,666 buildings in Dutch national parks were built before 1900 — many are listed monumenten, churches, farmhouses, hunting lodges. The 1945–1979 boom shows up here too, but post-park-designation construction (2000+) is also substantial: park status restricts but doesn't freeze building activity.
Both layers stream directly from cloud-native PMTiles via HTTP range requests — no tile server, no GeoJSON download. The full 933 MB BAG GeoParquet is published as a PMTiles tile pyramid; the parks file is just a few KB. Buildings start appearing at zoom 9; toggle filters to colour by function. Click any park to fly to it. Toggle "All Netherlands" to compare in-park building patterns to the surroundings.
| # | Park | Hectares | Buildings | Per ha |
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