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Introducing Maastricht
Make no bones about it: Maastricht is utterly beautiful. The Crown Jewel of the south –maybe even the entire country – it’s about as far from windmills, clogs and tulips as you’d want. Much of the Netherlands has a ‘samey’ feel to it, but here there are Spanish and Roman ruins, cosmopolitan food, French and Belgian twists in the architecture, a shrugging off of the shackles of Dutch restraint. Even the landscape’s different: there are actually hilly streets and what passes for mountains ringing the centre. Unsurprisingly, many locals see themselves as a sophisticated breed apart from the north; by the same token, earthy northerners see posh Maastricht as having an identity crisis – are these people Dutch or what?
Spanning both banks of the Maas river, with a host of pavement cafés and lovely old cobblestone streets, Maastricht is renowned for world-class dining and an elegant atmosphere that’s exquisitely addictive. Hemmed in between Belgium and Germany, it has a pan-European flavour: the average citizen bounces easily between Dutch, English, French, German and Flemish (maybe more). Appropriately, the city hosted two key moments in the history of the EU: on 10 December 1991, the 12 members of the then European Community met to sign the treaty for economic, monetary and political union; they reconvened the following February to sign the treaty creating the EU.
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