Every design for Culemborg

Culemborg owes its name to a pit of water left behind by a dike breach, and to the castle built beside it around 1270: the name means, quite literally, castle by the pit. The pool is gone, but water still shapes everything here.

The town lies just south of the Lek, in the centre of the country, and the river is never far away. Its banks open into floodplains that are now nature reserves, the Steenwaard and the Goilberdingerwaarden among them, and Werk aan het Spoel, an old fort, lies out among them. In the nineteenth century a railway bridge was thrown across the Lek here, and for a few years it was the longest bridge in Europe. For centuries Culemborg was a free city with the right of asylum, where debtors could escape their creditors; to this day the Dutch king is count of Culemborg. The Elisabethweeshuis still stands in the centre, and south of town lies the site of the castle Caetshage.

Coming back across the river, with the walls and the dike ahead of you, the whole shape of the town tells you that you are home.