Around the year 800, this whole expanse was peat bog. A small river called the Bamestra ran through it, and that name eventually softened into Beemster. Then, between 1150 and 1250, peat digging and storm floods chewed the river open until it had become a shallow inland lake connected to the Zuiderzee. By the early seventeenth century, Amsterdam merchants flush with East India Company profits looked at that lake and saw farmland waiting to be uncovered. Reclamation began in 1607. A ring dike went up around the lake, and forty-three windmills - arranged in stepped rows so that each one lifted water a little higher into the next - began the slow grind of pumping a sea into the sea. The work was nearly finished in 1610 when the Zuiderzee dike burst and refilled the basin overnight. They rebuilt the ring dike a full meter higher and started again. On May 19, 1612, the Beemster was dry.

The man who supervised the mills was Jan Adriaanszoon Leeghwater, a millwright from De Rijp who had taken the surname Leeghwater - literally "empty water" - the way other men might take a coat of arms. He was 36 when the polder came dry, and he would spend the rest of his life draining lakes across Holland. What makes the Beemster different from other reclamations is what happened after the water left. The investors had read their Vitruvius. They laid the new land out as a Renaissance grid, with roads on a strict north-south, east-west axis and feeder canals running parallel about a kilometer off the road lines. The geometry was rational; it was also philosophical. The Beemster was a statement that human reason could redraw the world.

The fields turned out to be exceptional. Rich clay sat just below the surface, fed by mineral silt that the lake had spent centuries depositing. Farmers in the new polder grew the durable crops that VOC ships needed for the long passage to Batavia - hard cheeses, smoked meats, salt-cured everything. Other contemporary drainage projects, like the Heerhugowaard a few kilometers west, struggled with sour soil and disappointed their investors. The Beemster did not. By the late seventeenth century, country estates dotted the grid - elegant brick mansions where Amsterdam regents spent their summers staring across perfectly rectangular pastures. Five fortresses of the later Stelling van Amsterdam defense ring would eventually be built within the polder, making the Beemster the rare place that holds two UNESCO World Heritage Sites at once.

The polder still does what it was made to do. CONO Kaasmakers, the cooperative dairy in Middenbeemster, has been pressing milk from Beemster cows into wheels of cheese since 1901; the brand now ships to North America, Japan, and China. The herd grazes on grass that grows on what was, geologically speaking, lakebed twelve generations ago. Middenbeemster has another claim too. In February 1622, ten years after the polder came dry, a son was baptized there to a schoolmaster who painted on the side. The boy was Carel Fabritius. He would study under Rembrandt, move to Delft, paint a small picture of a chained goldfinch in 1654 - and die later that same year when a municipal gunpowder magazine exploded and took roughly a third of Delft with it. He was 32. Only about a dozen of his paintings survive.

UNESCO inscribed the Beemster in 1999, citing it as a masterpiece of creative planning whose ideas spread through the Netherlands and on to drainage schemes from England to Russia. What seals the case is that the original grid is still the working grid. Drive any of the long straight roads today and the farms on either side sit on the same parcels their first owners bought in 1612. The polder is fully 3.5 metres below sea level. Pumps have replaced the windmills, but the water still has to leave; if it ever stopped leaving, the lake would come back inside a season.