Europe’s weirdest border – where locals move their front doors to pay less tax

Mattie BrignalSat, May 16, 2026 at 7:00 AM UTC

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Residents and tourists alike can oscillate between Belgium and the Netherlands - Jeff Gilbert

Husbands and wives sleeping next to each other in different countries. Residents moving their front doors for lower tax rates. Weddings restricted to one side of the town hall. Just another day in Baarle.

The sleepy town in the southern Netherlands is a cartographic anomaly. Pockets of Belgian territory – collectively known as Baarle-Hertog – are scattered throughout the Dutch municipality of Baarle-Nassau.

Some of these Belgian areas contain fragments of Dutch territory, meaning the two countries are stacked like Russian dolls.

This patchwork quilt of enclaves is delineated by white-cross border markers printed on the pavements and slicing through homes, cafés, bars and shops. Miniature Belgian and Dutch flags are printed on lamp posts and above front doors to remind passers-by which country they’re in.

The bizarre arrangement is a hangover from the Middle Ages, when aristocrats doled out and swapped pockets of land that were later frozen into national boundaries in the 1843 Treaty of Maastricht. (One tiny rectangle of farmland remained disputed territory until 1995, when it was finally assigned to Belgium.)

Baarle’s borders throw up an array of practical problems for its 10,000 inhabitants who frequently have to navigate two legal, planning, tax and education systems. But these same ambiguities also present opportunities for enterprising citizens who have been exploiting the town’s quirks for centuries.

Homes are split down the middle, with the kitchen in Belgium and the bedroom in the Netherlands - Jeff GilbertButter smugglers and fuel tourists

Smuggling was a “big problem” for most of Baarle’s history, according to Willem van Gool, the sprightly head of the town’s tourist office.

“Farmers would move their livestock to a neighbour’s field at night, just across the border, to sell them for a higher price and avoid domestic taxes,” he says.

The uphill struggle to police the borders has become Baarle folklore. In the 1960s, one shrewd resident built a bank on a border, shifting funds and paperwork from one side to the other to dodge tax inspectors and launder gains of questionable origin.

Another story tells of women suspected of smuggling butter under their clothes being asked by customs inspectors to stand by a fire while their papers were inspected, so the contraband melted out of them.

Smuggling has been on the decline since the 1993 introduction of the European Single Market, which removed customs checks and brought in minimum tax standards across the continent. But Baarle’s modern-day residents have found legal ways to take advantage of the border.

Art Verhagen, 70, is stocking up on cheap Trappist brews at De Biergrens – “The Beer Border” – a retailer with a boundary printed on the shop floor in the colours of the Dutch and Belgian flags. If the premises of a business are bisected by a border, the firm pays taxes on profits to both governments according to how many square metres fall on either side.

Art Verhagen taking advantage of ‘The Beer Border’ - Jeff Gilbert

“A lot has changed since I was young,” says Verhagen, who grew up in Dutch-administered Baarle-Nassau. “50 years ago, butter, sugar, animals would be moved across the borders. Now the town is mostly full of tourists for beer and fuel.”

He says it with the resignation of an old-timer witnessing terminal decline. But in his next breath Verhagen reveals where he’s heading next: across to the Belgian side of the border to fill up his car with cut-price petrol.

Price caps and lower fuel duty in Belgium mean petrol costs around €0.5 less per litre than on the Dutch side, so filling up a tank can save around €30. Because it’s legal to fill jerrycans with up to 240 litres of fuel in Belgium, drivers stockpile petrol and diesel when the price gap widens.

On the Belgian side of the border, just down the road from De Biergrens, a queue of a dozen cars snakes on to the road outside a petrol station forecourt. This is a common occurrence, according to van Gool, who says “fuel tourists” regularly cause traffic jams throughout town.

Border fan hotspot

Baarle’s unique borders attract curious visitors from all over the world. In the town square, tourists draped in Belgian and Dutch flags pose with one leg planted either side of the border, two thumbs up and a big grin.

Drinking tea in the sun outside a brasserie are Nikita Kvir, a 29-year-old “border anomaly enthusiast”, and his mother, Tatiana.

Their table, bolted to the ground, is strategically placed a fraction over the Dutch side of the white-cross line (for tax reasons, the owner says). Kvir sits 2ft away from his mother, on the Belgian side.

The pair have travelled from Austria to experience Baarle’s territorial curiosity first-hand, drawn by the town’s resemblance on the map to the felt-tip squiggles of a toddler.

Kvir is part of a “quite niche” community of hobbyists who travel the world in search of the weirdest geopolitical quirks. They share maps and photos privately and on Reddit threads, one of the biggest being r/Borderporn. “Don’t worry,” he says. “It’s safe for work.”

Nikita Kvir, who visited the town with his mother, is a ‘border anomaly enthusiast’ - Jeff Gilbert

Kvir recently visited Jungholz, a territory connected to Austria by a single point on the map at the top of a mountain ridge. Its status as an exclave is fiercely debated among border aficionados.

He is also fascinated by Gornja Siga, a patch of uninhabited and “unclaimed” land on the banks of the Danube between Croatia and Serbia. In 2015, Vít Jedlička, a Czech political activist and libertarian, planted a flag in the 7km2 floodplain, claimed it as a micro-state, and named it the “Free Republic of Liberland”.

Baarle, however, is “the most famous” oddity among fans. “It’s just really cool,” Kvir says.

Van Gool is proud to have branded Baarle the “World Capital of Enclaves”. According to one definition, the town is home to 30 of the world’s 63 enclaves, defined as a territory belonging to one state entirely surrounded by the territory of another.

Covid played a major role in putting Baarle on the map, he says. Pandemic restrictions were a “nightmare” for the authorities. Belgium enforced a complete lockdown for much of the first wave, while Netherlands had lockdown-lite – or “intelligent lockdown”.

The different rules and unhelpful branding implied that Belgians were being needlessly cautious. Mask-less Dutch wandering around the town created “a lot of friction”.

The authorities’ solution – an inevitable fudge – was to tell all residents to adopt the most restrictive rules of the two jurisdictions. Legally it was unenforceable, but people understood why it was being done, and stuck to the rules.

The silver lining was that the world’s press flocked to Baarle, intrigued by how it was navigating the contradictions. “It was a mad-house here,” van Gool says.

TikTok and Instagram have helped raise the town’s online profile since the pandemic, and tourism has exploded.

“We used to have one or two thousand visitors a year. Now we have 60,000 who register in this office – and many more who don’t.”

There’s a healthy dose of kitsch in Baarle’s celebration of its claim to fame. The town’s two councils built a flag-adorned grensschommel – “border swing” – along a boundary near the centre of town, so residents can oscillate between Belgium and the Netherlands with gay abandon.

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Swinging back and forth are Raymond von Dort, 54 and his wife, Sylvia, 55, from Rotterdam. They took a detour on their holiday road trip to visit Baarle. “It’s a famous place,” von Dort says. “And the border is very interesting.”

Best of both worlds

Out for a stroll near the border swing are Thomas, 36, and Ruth, 44, with their daughter Amelie and newborn twins.

The Dutch couple work in the Netherlands but live in a Belgian area of town. They are used to the extra hassle that comes with living in Baarle – they have to pay taxes to both governments – but their new arrivals have reminded them just how impractical the system can be.

“There’s a lot more admin, especially with children,” Thomas says. “It took us months to get all the paperwork in order [for the twins].

“We had to get Dutch passports for them but then show them to the Belgian government to prove they exist. It’s complicated.”

Thomas and Ruth live in Belgium but work in the Netherlands – allowing them to avoid the former’s punitive income tax regime - Jeff Gilbert

Few understand Baarle’s byzantine bureaucracy better than Philip Loots, the mayor of Baarle-Hertog.

Loots is standing in the Belgian town hall, where an illuminated strip runs diagonally across the floor, marking where Belgium ends and the Netherlands begins.

He explains that when he officiates weddings in the room, participants must be careful not to stray on to the Dutch side of the line, or the ceremony may be considered void under Belgian law.

Loots has the meticulous manner of a snooker referee, and exudes the zen-like patience required for months-long discussions over the minutiae of daily life in Baarle.

As head of the Belgian municipality, Loots is in “constant contact” with his Dutch counterpart, the mayor of Baarle-Nassau, to coordinate everything from resurfacing roads to cross-border bin collections.

“It’s not a question of will we work it out together, but how will we work it out,” he says. “Because we’ve got to. We’re like Siamese twins.”

He is acutely aware of the absurdities of the system, which involves two town halls, two elected councils, two police forces and joint committees to oversee Baarle’s water, electricity and gas.

“The fact that there are some houses where the border cuts through the bedroom and couples sleep on different sides, that’s crazy,” he says.

Despite being mayor of the Belgian municipality, Loots has more Dutch citizens living in his territory – like Thomas and Ruth – than Belgians.

As mayor of the Belgian part of Baarle, Philip Loots takes responsibility for co-operation with the Dutch side - Jeff Gilbert

The main reason is economic. Income taxes in Belgium are some of the most punitive in the world, and considerably higher than in the Netherlands. As workers pay income tax depending on where they work rather than where they live, many Dutch citizens in high-paying jobs in the Netherlands have moved to Belgian territory in Baarle, where house prices are cheaper.

“We see a lot of people working in the Netherlands and living on the Belgian side,” Loots says. “So they get the best of both worlds.”

Things get more complicated for anyone living in one of Baarle’s 160 homes with a border running directly through them, known as “line houses”.

If you live in a line house, your country of residence and tax jurisdiction are dictated by whether your front door opens on to Belgian or Dutch territory.

The “front door rule” is one of many pragmatic solutions to the quirks thrown up by the border. Moving front doors is possible but strictly controlled.

“People have built extensions to their houses so they can have a front door on one side of the border,” van Gool says. “But it would be a mess if everyone did it. There needs to be a good practical reason.”

When a 1995 commission inspected the town’s borders, it found that one line was slightly off. This would have meant reclassifying the home of an elderly woman as being in Belgium rather than the Netherlands. Doing so would have “completely upended her life”, Loots says, as all her social security was set up according to Belgian law. The authority’s solution, to ensure she could remain in Belgium, was to move her front door two feet to the left.

Tourists flock from all over the world to have their photo taken as they stand in two countries at once - Jeff GilbertA beacon to the world

Loots sees Baarle as the European project in microcosm – a poster-child for international cooperation.

“We are constantly talking to people from Baarle-Nassau,” he says. “We have a very good relationship. We know it’s important. We always call if there’s a problem – it’s better than typing.”

If a road bisected by a border needs resurfacing, the cost is split between the two municipalities according to how much of it lies on each side.

For public spending relating to tourism, Baarle-Nassau shoulders 79pc of the cost, reflecting its relative share of visitor accommodation.

The Dutch administration is also footing 70pc of the bill for a new joint town hall (featuring, naturally, a revolving door so visitors enter in Belgium and exit in the Netherlands) in line with its larger population.

Baarle’s citizens get on “remarkably well”, Loots says. “We don’t see the borders: there are two countries, two municipalities, but one community.”

This wasn’t always the case. In the 1960s, the authorities felt the need to stagger finishing time for schools on either side of the border to prevent fights between pupils.

A mixed youth group that started in the 1970s helped to improve relations. Today, the two cultures interweave peacefully and mixed marriages are common.

The town has even attracted the attention of Benjamin Netanyahu, who reportedly wanted to explore the idea of using Baarle as a template to allow Jewish settlers to remain in pockets of Israeli territory in a future Palestinian state.

“We think Baarle is a good example of how to do things, given what’s happening in the world,” van Gool says.

“The appeal isn’t just the border, but to feel how we live in harmony together. We had one visitor from Kashmir who travelled here just to see how we did this, how it was possible for two communities to live side by side.

“There’s a lot of negotiation and haggling, which takes time. But at the end of the day, we find a solution – because we have to.”

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Source: “AOL Money”