De Cruquius Pumping Station

De Cruquius is one of three giant steam pumping stations that drained the Haarlemmermeer from 1849 onward, adding an entire city's worth of land to the Dutch province of North Holland. It houses the largest Cornish-type steam engine ever built: eight cylinders 3.66 m in diameter that lifted around 8,000 litres of water per stroke into the surrounding Ringvaart canal. The station is named after Nicolaus Samuelis Cruquius, the 18th-century hydraulic engineer who first proposed draining the lake. It pumped continuously until 1933 and has been a museum since 1934. Visitors today can watch the enormous beam engines move under steam pressure, walk among the pistons and flywheels, and follow scale models that explain how an entire polder was wrested from below sea level.