Long before the Netherlands existed as an idea, Roman legionaries pitched camp on a low hill above a bend in the Waal. The river marked the edge of empire here; everything north was barbaricum. The settlement they called Noviomagus, the new market, earned Roman city rights in the year 98 under Emperor Trajan, making it the oldest officially recognized city in what is now the Netherlands. The Valkhof hill where the camp once stood is now a park, and a small Carolingian chapel from around the year 1030 still keeps watch over it. The chapel is older than nearly every other intact building in the country. Stand inside it and you are sharing space with a thousand years of weather and worship.

Nijmegen sits awkwardly on the map. Eight months after the American bombing of 1944, the city found itself in the path of Operation Market Garden, the Allied parachute gamble immortalized in A Bridge Too Far. The 82nd Airborne dropped near Groesbeek to seize the Waal bridge. They got it. The British 1st Airborne, sixteen kilometers further north at Arnhem, did not get theirs. For five more months after the liberation in September 1944, German artillery shelled Nijmegen from across the river. By the time the guns stopped, much of what the bombers had spared had been ground down too. The few medieval survivors, like the thirteenth-century Sint-Stevenskerk and the fifteenth-century weighing hall on the Grote Markt, stand today as quiet witnesses rather than backdrops.

Every July, the population of Nijmegen swells from roughly 160,000 to nearly two million. The reason is the Vierdaagse, the International Four Days Marches, the largest multi-day walking event in the world. Tens of thousands of walkers cover thirty, forty, or fifty kilometers a day for four consecutive days through the surrounding countryside. The event began in 1909 as a Dutch army endurance exercise and has marched almost every year since. Soldiers in uniform from a dozen countries walk alongside grandparents, students, and children. On the final afternoon, finishers parade down the Sint Annastraat, called Via Gladiola for the day, while crowds press gladiolas into their hands. The whole city becomes a single, shuffling, slightly limping celebration of having simply kept going.

The neighborhoods east and south of the bombed center survived the war largely intact. Bottendaal, a five-minute walk from the central station, has narrow brick streets, student cafes, and the loose, opinionated energy of a university town. Nijmegen claims to have more pubs per square meter than any other Dutch city, and a credible candidate for the oldest of them, In de Blaauwe Hand, has been pouring beer just off the Grote Markt for over four centuries. The autumn street fair, the Nijmeegse Kermis, dates back to 1272 and is the oldest in the Netherlands. The pattern across the city is consistent: things that survived are very old, and things that did not survive are remembered carefully.

From the air, Nijmegen is a city of bridges and water. The Waal, a main distributary of the Rhine, sweeps in a broad curve past the old town, and the long Waalbrug, when it opened in 1936, was briefly the longest arch bridge in Europe. North of it lies Lent, a new district built on a re-channeled floodplain meant to give the river room to breathe. To the east, the forested moraines around Groesbeek rise gently toward Germany; to the southeast lies the Reichswald, and the Groesbeek Canadian War Cemetery, where many of the men who liberated this city now rest. The old enemy and the old ally are both right there, within bicycle distance, on a landscape that has been a frontier for two thousand years.