Queen Máxima had her name added to the Pantheon of Dutch waterways. The queen herself inaugurated the new Máxima Canal, bypassing the city of Den Bosch and enabling the transport of larger cargo vessels across the province of Brabant.
Máxima is not the first queen or princess to have a waterway named after her. In the southern part of the Netherlands there is the 68 kilometer long Wilhelmina Canal, already planned in 1794 but only opened in 1923 and named after Queen Wilhelmina.
There is also a Juliana Canal, inaugurated by Princess Juliana in 1935. The princess was only 16 when ten years earlier she had symbolically started the construction. Juliana’s eldest daughter Beatrix got ‘her canal' in 1940. It was finished just as the Second World War had started and the royal family had already fled the country. The 8,4 kilometer long canal is connected to the Wilhelmina Canal.
The ‘grandfather’ of all such waterways is no doubt the Zuid-Willemsvaart – South William’s Channel, named after the first king of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, Willem I. The 123 kilometer long waterway, which connects Liege in Belgium and Den Bosch in the Netherlands, was build to bypass the Meuse river, and opened in 1826.
The new Máxima Canal is in fact a bypass of the Zuid-Willemsvaart. Cargo ships no longer have to pass through Den Bosch itself.
© RB; Photos by © RPE Albert Nieboer
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