Are you one of those who is still not clear If Holland and the Netherlands are the same? Don’t you know what’s right? ¿The name Netherlands or Holland can be used interchangeably.? You are not the only person with this doubt. Holland has historically been called the Netherlands because it was the name that the country itself has used, even though the Netherlands is the official nomenclature.

Until 2020, they were used practically synonymously, but in 2019, the Dutch Government decided eliminate use of the term ‘Holland’ to refer to the entire country, although at the tourist level this option had always been chosen. The decision was made to put an end to decades of confusion. One of the Foreign Ministry spokespersons explained at the time that a more uniform and coordinated brand was needed:

“We want to present Netherlands as an open countryinventive and inclusive,” he explained. The truth is that one of the intentions was separate the region from Holland of issues such as recreational drug use or Amsterdam’s red light district.

But another was to solve an internal problem. And even if the Dutch name was used to refer to any national, it only serves to refer to people who come from the region of Holland. “Holland and Dutch is frequently used outside, and we understand it, but On a national scale it is something else.. A resident of Brabant or Friesland is not Dutch, but Dutchlike the rest of the inhabitants, and that is also important,” several Foreign Affairs spokespersons told the newspaper in 2020. The country.

What does Netherlands and Holland mean?

The Netherlands is flat and densely populated —it has about 17.7 million inhabitants, according to 2022 data—. Due to their climate and geological conditions, they have the variety of vegetation typical of a continental climate tempered by the Atlantic. The country also has large areas of lakes, rivers and canals.

But where does its name come from? Netherlands is the literal translation into Spanish of Nederlandwhich comes from the Dutch term ‘Neder-landen’, meaning “lowlands”. It makes sense that the country is called that, given that a quarter of its surface It is below sea level. The highest point is located in the extreme southeast and is only 321 meters above sea level.

On the other hand, the etymology of Holland does not seem so clear. It is likely, however, that this toponym comes from the term ‘holt’, which in Dutch means forest or jungle. If this theory is true, Holland would come to mean something like ‘wooded land’‘land of forests’ or ‘land of jungles’.

Do we still call the Netherlands Holland?

Hollandalthough it has historically been used to refer to the entire country, in a strict sense it refers to a region in the west of the Netherlandswhich in turn is divided into two provinces, South Holland and North Holland. In this area are some important cities of the country such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague.

However, despite national efforts, in Spain we continue to call the country Holland. The country’s Foreign Affairs already knew that it would be an especially complicated challenge in countries like Spain, France or Italy, where Holland has been used instead of the Netherlands to avoid confusion. “In the Spanish case, because the second It is usually associated with the former territories of the Netherlands from the time of Philip II, which covered, among others, up to present-day Luxembourg. Or Benelux itself, as a whole. It is an additional challenge that we must face for this brand renewal operation to be successful,” they said then.

While in Spain we continue to use both terms (incorrectly, it should be remembered), in the rest of the world they have decreasing the use of Holland to increasingly refer to the country as Netherlandsespecially from 2022.