Mozesbrug
Interesting facts
- The walkway is held down by anchors to a reinforced concrete slab on the moat floor, because the watertight wooden trough would otherwise float like a boat.
- Its sunken deck runs about 22 metres through the water inside a slot just 1.2 metres wide, flanked by two walls of wooden sheet piling.
- Rainwater and any moat water that slops over the edge collect in a gutter under the planks and are pumped out by hand rather than automatically.
- The designers, Ro Koster and Ad Kil of RO&AD Architecten, deliberately avoided a float-switch pump for fear it would run dry and fail.
- Fort de Roovere was the largest fort of the West Brabant Water Line, a chain of earthen forts and dykes begun during the Eighty Years' War.
- Between 1628 and 1832 the land in front of the line was deliberately flooded six times: once against the Spanish, four times against the French and once against the Belgians.
- Altogether the defensive floods kept the area under water for roughly fifty years over the two centuries the line was in service.
- After the fort lost its military role in 1832 its moat dried out and became overgrown; it was only dug out again during restoration that began in 2010.
- The fort was earthen, open at the rear and defended at the front by two bastions, and an earth rampart linked it to the neighbouring Fort Pinssen.
Why it is worth it
This is a bridge designed to be invisible from a distance and slightly disorienting up close. Built in 2010 across the moat of Fort de Roovere, a 17th-century Dutch star fort, it doesn't rise over the water at all — it's sunk into a trench cut through the moat itself, so the wooden walkway sits below the surrounding water level while staying dry underfoot. Approaching the fort, there's no visible structure to spot; the water and grassy embankments simply run unbroken up to the trench's edges, and the bridge only reveals itself once you're standing at the opening, looking down into a narrow channel that seems to part the moat like a Biblical sea — which is exactly where the nickname comes from.
The design solves an old defensive problem rather than a purely aesthetic one. This side of the fort faced the direction an attacking army was expected to approach from, and the architects reasoned that a bridge standing up out of the water would have handed any attacker an obvious, visible route straight to the walls. A bridge that couldn't be seen solved that, even three centuries after the fort itself stopped needing to worry about a siege. Built from Accoya, a modified wood engineered to resist rot in permanently wet conditions, it won the Dutch Building of the Year award in 2011.
Getting there
4 km from Bergen op Zoom. Antwerp International Airport (Deurne) (ANR) is about 39 km away.
On these lists
51.52882, 4.30113per Wikidata