Baarle-Hertog

Baarle-Hertog is a Flemish municipality in the Belgian province of Antwerp, best known because most of its territory consists of small Belgian exclaves fully surrounded by the Netherlands. Parts of it are enclosed by the Dutch province of North Brabant. In total the municipality consists of 26 separate parcels of land, of which four are linked to other Belgian municipalities. Its border with Baarle-Nassau in the Netherlands is famously complicated, the result of medieval treaties, agreements, land swaps and sales between the Lords of Breda and the Dukes of Brabant, which were ratified and clarified under the Treaty of Maastricht in 1843. Since the 1990s the close integration of the European Union and the Schengen Agreement have made many of the practical difficulties of this arrangement much simpler. The municipality covers 7.48 square kilometres, and the citypopulation.de table for the province of Antwerp gives an estimate of 3,103 residents for 1 January 2026.