Saeftinghe through the ages

The name is first recorded in 821, in the form Chavetinghe, as a holding of King Louis the Pious. What made the place worth holding was also what would eventually destroy it: it sat in eastern Zeelandic Flanders at the point where the Scheldt meets the salt water of the North Sea, on ground that had to be taken from the tide before anyone could farm it.

That work was done in the thirteenth century, when the land was drained and diked under the management of the abbey of Ter Doest. Willem van Saeftinghe, one of the best known of the abbey's occupants, gave his name to the stretch of land claimed from the sea. His personal shield is the source of the flag still associated with the place, a blue lion rampant on a white field.

The reclaimed ground was very fertile polder, and Saeftinghe made its living from farming it, from trade, and from moernering, the digging and burning of peat to win sea salt. Agriculture and salt together brought work and money, and the town became one of the most prosperous places in the region. Its polder was at its greatest extent and wealth around 1350.

It did not stand alone. Namen, Sint-Laureins, Stampaert, Weele (also called Sint-Marie), and Casuwele lay nearby, most of them small villages of a few houses and huts. At the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth, Saeftinghe passed for some decades to the count of Flanders, who built a castle not far from the settlement (the Saeftingher Slot, dated to 1279), both because the site commanded the division of the Scheldt and the Honte and to make his power visible on it.

The polder held until 1570, when the All Saints' flood, the Allerheiligenvloed, took most of the land around the town. Four years later the drowned ground reached as far as what is now Belgium. Saeftinghe itself and some land immediately around it were all that stayed dry.

In 1584, during the Eighty Years' War, Dutch soldiers found themselves forced to destroy the last intact dike, and Saeftinghe sank into the waters of the Scheldt. The town has never been retrieved. Everything that stood there lies under several layers of clay and sand, and large bricks turned up inland are probably remains of the abbey, reused by villagers for their own houses after floods destroyed it; some are now shown in the visitor centre.

Reclamation was attempted repeatedly over the following centuries. The most serious effort came in 1907, and even that won back only the Hertogin Hedwigepolder, on which the hamlet of Emmadorp now stands. The rest remained what it is today: a tidal marsh where the water can take large stretches of ground in seconds, and which is not to be walked without an experienced guide.

A legend of Saeftinghe explains the flood as a punishment. It holds that a mermaid was caught and not set free, that the merman cursed the region for it, and that the resulting flood destroyed Sint-Laureins, Namen and Casuwele and killed everyone in them. The same tradition says a tower bell still calls for help from the sunken town. A second local legend accounts for figures seen in the fog by visitors and by people from Emmadorp as the spirits of the inhabitants of those three drowned villages.

In 1970 the whole area was absorbed into the municipality of Hulst, when Graauw en Langendam and Clinge ceased to exist. Within the historical municipal limits Saeftinghe has a population of 55. The marsh is an official nature reserve, known in Dutch as the Verdronken Land van Saeftinghe, in the province of Zeeland, and the town beneath it is now classed as a submerged settlement. A visitor centre opened at Emmadorp in 1997 as the departure point for excursions into the reserve, and between 1997 and 2007 an average of around 12,000 people a year took one.