1/5 Memories of Bergen op Zoom by the sea
Chicly dressed bathers who bathe their feet on the Zeekant in Bergen op Zoom at the Kurhaus on the salty Oosterschelde. They are images from times long gone, because the Kurhaus has not existed since the war. But it was not even that long ago that Bergen op Zoom was by the sea. The completion of the Oesterdam in 1986 put an end to this. “It was really nice here at the Zeekant”, Diny Dietvorst muses.
The flood disaster of February 1, 1953 made painfully clear with 1836 victims how vulnerable West Brabant and Zeeland were to the devastating seawater. The Delta Works that followed were supposed to prevent another disaster. But they also radically changed the nautical chart in that area.
Kurhaus
“In the past, you could look all the way west from Bergen op Zoom in clear weather over the Oosterschelde,” says Diny. “And of course you had ebb and flow. At high tide you could go swimming,” adds her husband Gerrit Dietvorst.
In 1910 there was even a real one on the Zeekant Kurhaus built, intended for paying bathers. With a subscription they could enjoy the sea, attend concerts, watch sports matches and for five cents children could ride a donkey. In 1940 the Kurhaus was closed and in the course of the war increasingly stripped for firewood.
As a child, Margreet Ambagts played a lot in and near the water: “At high tide you could dive straight into the water from the dike. And at low tide we would scoop worms that we hung on hooks between two sticks in the sand. And when the high water had been over it, then caught fish such as eels hung on it.”
Delta Works
In the beginning, the construction of the Delta Works did not directly affect Bergen op Zoom. But that changed with the arrival of the Oesterdam, which was built between 1979 and 1986 between Zuid-Beveland and Tholen. Slowly but surely the ebb and flow disappeared and the part of the Oosterschelde that bordered Brabant was changed into Markiezaatsmeer, Zoommeer and Binnenschelde. With fresh water.
But the construction of the Oesterdam did not always go smoothly, as in March 1982 when a storm again caused the sea to splash against Bergen op Zoom. Piet Blaas made these images of it:
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The Bergse Plate
At the end of the 1980s, part of the Binnenschelde was raised with dredging from the Scheldt-Rhine Canal, after which the construction of a completely new district of Bergen op Zoom started in 1991: the Berg Plate. So where you used to see the sea to the horizon, you now see houses and flats from the Zeekant.
But it could have turned out very differently. Because in the early 1970s there were serious plans to partly fill up the Oosterschelde. It Reimerswaal plan. Former city archivist Cees Vanwesenbeeck: “If it had been up to politics, the Oosterschelde would have become an extension of the port of Antwerp.”
New nature
High from the watchtower on the Kraaijenberg on the Brabantse Wal, Vanwesenbeeck peers over the Markiezaatsmeer to the much lower Zeeland in the distance: “No, I’d rather see this.”
In recent decades, new nature has emerged in places where the sea used to crash against the dikes. And if you look closely you can see the cars with caravans driving to the beaches of Zeeland in the summer. Bathers on their way to the sea, salt, ebb and flow.
Watch the LIVE registration of the commemoration of the flood disaster from the Sint Quirinuskerk in Halsteren on Omroep Brabant on Wednesday, February 1 at 2 p.m. Subsequently (at 3.15 pm) the documentary ‘I was a child in 1953’ will be broadcast. Six people who experienced the flood disaster as children talk about their experiences. The documentary shows the enormous impact the disaster had on the children in the affected areas:
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