Lely's plan was audacious even by Dutch standards. The Zuiderzee Works would seal off a 1,500-square-mile inlet, convert it to a freshwater lake, and reclaim five polders from the seabed. Parliament approved the project in 1918 during the panic that followed wartime food shortages, and the Afsluitdijk closed in 1932. The Oostelijk Flevoland polder was drained in 1957. Engineers and laborers were the first to live on the new land, camping on what had been the construction island for the dikes. The city of Lelystad was officially founded in 1967, when ordinary residents began arriving on streets laid out in advance on what had been, ten years earlier, the bottom of a sea. Few European cities can name their birthday so precisely.

Modernist planning is out of fashion now, but Lelystad is unembarrassed about being a deliberate creation. Wide boulevards meet at predictable angles. Districts are zoned with diagrammatic clarity: housing here, industry there, shopping ringed by parking. The result is efficient and a little austere, and Dutch travelers tend to skip it in favor of Almere down the road or Amsterdam across the IJ. But unembarrassed honesty has its own appeal. Lelystad does not pretend to be old. Its history fits neatly within the lifespans of people who still live there, who can remember when the polders were freshly drained and the first trees were saplings holding the sandy soil in place.

At the harbor sits the unlikeliest building in the city: a full-size replica of the Dutch East India Company ship Batavia, built between 1985 and 1995 at the Bataviawerf under master shipbuilder Willem Vos. The original Batavia wrecked on its maiden voyage in 1629 off the coast of Western Australia, where the survivors descended into one of the worst mutinies in maritime history. The replica was built using seventeenth-century methods and materials by apprentices learning a trade most of Europe forgot two centuries ago. It is moored at Lelystad because the sea the original ship sailed for no longer exists where the city stands; the harbor where she rests was sea floor when her sister ships were still trading spices.

Bataviastad, just past the ship, is the other thing that brings outsiders to Lelystad. A pastel-painted designer outlet mall in the shape of a fortified Dutch town, it draws weekend crowds from Amsterdam and beyond who come for marked-down brands and stay for the harbor view. South of the city the Oostvaardersplassen opens into Europe's strangest accidental wilderness. North along the Houtribdijk, a long causeway runs across the Markermeer to Enkhuizen on the old shore. The city's population skews young, and its residents come from everywhere: there are sizable Surinamese, Turkish, and Moroccan communities, and the kitchens reflect them. Lelystad is what you get when you start a city from scratch in the late twentieth century and let it become whatever it becomes.