Almost four million people in the Netherlands go to sleep below sea level every night. Their homes, highways and even their main airport sit on land that used to be the bottom of the sea. So why don't they drown?

In this documentary we travel from the North Sea beach down to the lowest point in the country, 22 feet below the sea. Along the way: a city standing on wooden poles, families who live inside windmills, a city built on the old seafloor, an airport at the bottom of a lake, and the night in 1953 when the sea came back.

In this video:
Why Amsterdam's foundations are in danger when there is too little water
Kinderdijk: 19 windmills that are really pumps, and the families who live inside them
Almere: a city of 230,000 people on a drained seabed
Schiphol: one of Europe's busiest airports, 11 feet below sea level
The highway that runs under a shipping canal
The 1953 flood, and the ship that was steered into a broken dike
Cortelande: 8,000 new homes planned about 15 feet below the sea

CHAPTERS
0:00 Houses below a cargo ship
2:00 Amsterdam: a city on wooden poles
3:44 Kinderdijk: living inside the pumps
6:28 Almere: a city on the seafloor
8:18 Schiphol: an airport at the bottom of a lake
10:14 The highway under a canal
11:36 Rotterdam: giving water a place to go
12:46 1953: the night the sea came back
15:54 Never again
16:40 Cortelande: 8,000 homes below the sea
18:36 The lowest point in the Netherlands
19:20 Why they can sleep

Note: some aqueduct shots show the Veluwemeer Aqueduct, a similar Dutch aqueduct, not the Gouwe Aqueduct. Some images are illustrations, and some modern footage is styled to look archival.

Would you buy a house 15 feet below the sea? Tell us in the comments.

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