Nijmegen is a municipality and a city in the east of the Netherlands, near the German border. It is considered to be the oldest city in the Netherlands and celebrated its 2000th year of existence in 2005. The municipality is part of the “Stadsregio Arnhem-Nijmegen”, a metropolitan area with 736,107 inhabitants.
The first mention of Nijmegen in history is in the 1st century BC, when the Romans built a military camp on the place where Nijmegen was to appear; the location had great strategic value because of the surrounding hills, which gave (and continue to give) a good view over the Waal and Rhine valley.
Few Roman remains are visible today; a fragment of the old city wall can be seen near the casino and the foundations of the amphitheatre are traced in the paving of the present-day Rembrandtstraat. The Valkhof museum, on the Valkhof, has a permanent display of the history of Nijmegen, including artifacts from the Roman era. Additionally, they usually have temporary exhibitions of more and less famous artists. Unfortunately not a whole lot of very old buildings are left in town: first the Americans carpet bombed it in February 1944, later the Germans shelled it for about five months after the liberation in September 1944, and finally there were a lot of very rigorous city planners in the 1950s, 60’s and 70’s who finished what the Americans and Germans started.
Nijmegen is host to Radboud University Nijmegen. Founded in 1923 as the first Catholic university in the Netherlands. It used to be called (Catholic) University of Nijmegen until 2004, when it took its current name. As of 2006 it had 17,627 students 4,336 staff. Radboud University runs the High Field Magnetic Laboratory which is able to achieve some of the highest fields available in Europe at 33 teslas (continuous) and 60 teslas (pulsed). The facility is available to outside users, primarily for research purposes. The Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010 awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov while at Radboud University “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene.”
Nijmegen is famous for the International Four Day March Nijmegen (Dutch: Internationale Vierdaagse Afstandsmarsen Nijmegen, informally Nijmeegse Vierdaagse), an annual event starting on the third Tuesday in July, comprising four days of walking (distances ranging from 30 to 50 km a day), and the accompanying festivities (the Vierdaagsefeesten including rock festival de-Affaire), which have been drawing the largest crowds for any Dutch event in the past few years. Besides other national and international well-known personalities the mother of Karl Marx, Henrietta Pressburg, is born in Nijmegen.
