Miniature Landscapes

If you like all things miniature, you simply have to go and visit the Miniature Landscape Museum in Beek-Ubbergen, close to Nijmegen. If you're incidentally also into badgers and into German expressionistic architecture, you're in for a treat! 

Or, if you don't have a lot of time to explore the variety of Dutch landscapes, you can cover ten of them by foot on a lazy afteroon. 

The area where the Miniature Museum, the badgers and Villa Wylberberg are located, used to be German, until the Netherlands annexed it after worldwar 2. Most Dutch postwar annexations were revoked in the 1960, but the Wylerberg remained Dutch.

It now houses a foundation working on restoring cultural landscapes, because as the Dutch saying goes: God created the earth, but the Dutch created the Netherlands. Most of the Netherlands consists of cultural landscapes - shaped by human activity. At the outdoor museum, you can check out typical Dutch polders, miniature hedges, roads and rivers and lifesize peacocks and hens, scrabbling in between the landscapes and occasionally knocking over a miniature tractor. 

Inside the villa you can learn more about the German family that commissioned the expressionist-style house and you can learn about badgers and other dwellers of Dutch cultural landscapes.