Bourtange
Interesting facts
- William of Orange ordered the first fort here in 1580, a five-bastioned redoubt laid out by Adriaen Anthonisz, burgomaster of Alkmaar.
- In 1593 a Spanish force of about 3,000 men under Francisco Verdugo tried to take the new fort and withdrew in September without success.
- Its first garrison numbered some 700 soldiers in five companies, supplied with provisions for one month.
- The great rebuilding of 1738 to 1742 was designed by the engineer Peter de la Rive on the orders of the States General.
- The powder magazine, built in 1704, was given a roof designed so that an explosion would not destroy the entire building.
- The village church, built in 1607, was the first newly built church in the province of Groningen after the Reduction of Groningen in 1594.
- The windmill on the ramparts is a replica put up in 1980; the original was dismantled during sieges.
- The restoration was first costed in 1968 at 5.5 million guilders, but by 1993 the bill had grown to about 40 million.
- Every year the fortress stages the Battle of Bourtange, one of the major historical re-enactments in the Netherlands.
- Bourtange is the second most visited attraction in the province of Groningen, after the Groninger Museum.
Why it is worth it
Seen from the air, Bourtange is a perfect geometric flower: a five-pointed star of green ramparts, ringed by a second star of moats, outworks and water, with a tiny village packed into the centre. The fortress was completed in 1593, during the Eighty Years' War, on a low ridge of sand running through the Bourtange Moor, a vast and nearly impassable peat bog on what is now the Dutch–German border. The name itself recalls that ridge. Whoever held it controlled the one dry road between Germany and Groningen, and the new fort helped cut off the Spanish garrison in Groningen, which surrendered in 1594.
Bourtange was never taken by an attacking army. Its most famous test came in 1672, when the forces of Christoph Bernhard von Galen, the Prince-Bishop of Münster and an ally of Louis XIV, invaded the northern Netherlands; the fort, protected by the marsh as much as by its walls, held. In the late 1730s and early 1740s the defences were rebuilt and enlarged, with new ravelins and a glacis, reaching their greatest extent. The garrison left in 1851, the fortress was decommissioned, and much of the earthwork was levelled and sold off as the place became an ordinary farming village.
What visitors walk through today is a deliberate act of restoration. From the late 1960s to the early 1990s the ramparts were rebuilt, the moats dug out again and the barracks reconstructed, following old plans, so that the fort looks as it did around 1740 to 1750. The effect is rare: most star forts survive as fragments or as outlines under a modern town, but here the whole pattern of bastions, ravelins and moats, with a rebuilt windmill on the ramparts, can be read on foot in an hour. The small grid of streets around the central square holds a Protestant church and an 1842 synagogue that now houses a Jewish museum, and the village as a whole is run as an open-air museum.
Getting there
Bourtange lies in the municipality of Westerwolde in the province of Groningen, right by the German border. The nearest town is Winschoten, about 19 km away. Groningen Airport Eelde (GRQ) is some 43 km away; regional buses link the village with Winschoten, Ter Apel and Emmen.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Bourtange is a village with a population of 430 in the municipality of Westerwolde in the Netherlands. It is situated in the region Westerwolde in the east of the province of Groningen near the German border. Fort Bourtange was built in 1593 during the Dutch Revolt and was used until 1851. Between 1967 and 1992 the star fort was gradually restored to its mid-18th-century state and it is currently an open-air museum.
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