Kempen (region)
The Kempen (also called Kempenland , French Campine ) are flat sand and heathland in the Belgian provinces of Antwerp and Limburg and in the south of the Dutch province of Noord-Brabant .
The area extends from the city of Lier , 20 km east of Antwerp , southwest of Eindhoven and west of Maaseik . The capital of the Kempen is Turnhout .
The Romans gave this sandy border district on the Meuse the name Campina (fields), from which the current Dutch name Kempen arose.
Industry and mining
Because of the sandy soil, the Kempen was a poor area characterized by poor agriculture until the 19th century . There were no major cities.
In the middle to the end of the 19th century, various metal factories settled in the sparsely populated area. Although these companies, the zinc factories in Lommel , Balen , Overpelt , Olen and Budel and the arsenic factory in Bocholt , polluted the environment heavily, people were happy about the many new jobs at the time. The pollution still affects these places today. So it is forbidden to drink the groundwater there.
In 1901, hard coal was discovered in the Limburg hard coal district ( Kempens steenkoolbekken in Dutch ) . One of the five Belgian coalfields was temporarily located in the Kempen. In the mid-1960s, the six mines there produced 10 million tonnes of coal per year (for comparison: the 36 mines in the French-speaking region ( Wallonia ) produced about the same amount).
In the course of industrialization and sustained population growth, Eindhoven developed into a large city, largely through the growth of the Philips company .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Der Spiegel 9/1959: The end of the closed season
- ↑ The time 16/1966: Black gold no longer shines