The highest point in the Netherlands, Mount Scenery on the Dutch island of Saba, has recently been measured at a lower height than what had previously been reported. The mountain found on Dutch Caribbean territory was originally thought to be up to 887 metres high, but is actually 17 metres lower than that.
If you’ve lived in the Netherlands for a while, you’re probably excited to see the slightest hill - never mind a mountain. For this reason, it may come as a surprise to hear that the highest point in the Netherlands is 870 metres high. While it may be lower than what it was originally thought to be, it is still impressive.
This highest peak in the country belongs to Mount Scenery, a mountain on the Caribbean island of Saba which is also the smallest special municipality of the Netherlands. A surveyor for the Dutch Land Registry, Jochem Lesparre discovered the discrepancy in heights when he joined weather organisation KNMI on the island to find locations for reference stations. “While I measured some reference points of the island to link map data of the island and satellite measurements, I thought: I might as well also measure the highest point,” Lesparre told NOS.
The actual height of Mount Scenery has been a bit of a mystery for a while now. On the island’s tourist website, it states that the summit is 887 metres high, but the physical sign at the top of the mountain claims the highest point of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is 877 metres.
Both these measurements clash with what Lesparre determined as the height of the dormant volcano. The geodetic engineer explains that the 10-metre-high transmission tower at the top of the mountain could explain the difference. “However, it is not common to take the height of a tower when measuring a mountain," Lesparre said.
Even with all this confusion and the new measurement, Mount Scenery is still the official highest point in the Netherlands, if you include the special municipalities of Bonaire, Saba and Sint-Eustatius. The highest elevation within the European Netherlands is the Vaalserberg in Limburg at 322 metres.