ABSTRACT
Friesland is one of the twelve provinces of the Netherlands (Fig. 10.1). Its area (3800km2, about 10 per cent of the whole country) makes it an average-size province, its population (604300 in 1993) one of the smaller ones. The population density (180 per km2) is low (the average for the country as a whole is 450km2) as befits a predominantly rural area. The provincial capital, Leeuwarden, is the biggest settlement but has only 87000 inhabitants. Nearly 3 per cent of employment in the province is in agriculture (in the Netherlands, the proportion is 1.7%), and the province attracts huge numbers of visitors each year, in particular for water sports (Friesland has 4 per cent of the Dutch population, but 8 per cent of all the overnight stays by Dutch people in their own country; it calls itself "the Dutch Lake District"). 2 The economic and social issues addressed by the regional plan arise mainly out of the rural nature and peripheral location of the province, with its thinly distributed population, and out of the conflicting demands of farming, recreation and nature conservation on this rural space.
