Every design for Urk

Urk is the fishing capital of the Netherlands, home to the country's largest fishing fleet and the fish-processing trade that has grown up around it, even if its boats now sail much farther to fill their holds than in most of its history. For centuries it was an island too: first in the inland sea called the Almere, then in the Zuiderzee, until a dike from Lemmer tied it to the mainland in 1939 and the Noordoostpolder was later drained around it.

Walk through the old village and the closeness of the place is almost tangible. Urkers keep their own dialect, very much alive, and their own anthem; church life runs deep, and the community is famously tight-knit. The Vuurtoren Urk and the Kerkje aan de Zee look out over the IJsselmeer, the Vissersmonument stands for the fishing families, and Museum 't Oude Raadhuis holds the island's long story. Even the ground is different here: a boulder-clay hill left by the Ice Age, carrying the highest point in Flevoland, with the High Cliff once rising sheer from the sea on its south-west side.

However far an Urk boat has travelled, the lighthouse on the old island is the sign that it is home again.