People enjoying the beach with the backdrop of cranes of Rotterdam harbour.

The Netherlands is densely populated; the 16.5 million Dutch men and women live on an area of 33,883 km²; this means that the country has a population density of 487 per km². Even though the country is so densely populated, there are no cities with a population over 1 million. Instead the "four big cities" as they are called (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht) can in many ways be regarded as a single metropolitan area, the "Randstad" (Dutch: rim or edge city) with about 7 million inhabitants around the agricultural "Groene Hart" (Dutch: green heart). The population density in Randstad is 1535 per km².

The Port of Rotterdam is the largest port in Europe. From 1962 until 2004 it was also the world's busiest port, now overtaken by first Shanghai and then Singapore. Covering 105 km2 (40.5 sq mi), the port of Rotterdam stretches over a distance of 40 kms (25 mi) from the city center's historic harbor area to the reclaimed Maasvlakte area, which projects into the North Sea.

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