Breukelen has 43 places, of which 29 give opening hours, 67 per cent. Of those, 66 per cent open on a Sunday and 41 per cent work past eleven. Some 26 per cent have no online presence.
That 41 per cent asks for no exemption at all. Stichtse Vecht closes hospitality only at three, and at the end of the week at four: the latest basic hour of these fourteen places. There is a kink in it: after two no one else may come in, and the terrace must be empty by midnight. Whoever works late here does so indoors and with the company already sitting there.
The village lies on the Vecht, and that river is the reason for the country houses strung along it like beads: summer houses of Amsterdam merchants. On one of them sits Nyenrode, there since 1946 and holding university status since 1982.
On the other side of the ocean a borough carries the name. A charter of 1646 calls the settlement on Long Island Breuckelen, and it is customarily connected with this Breukelen. Why that name was chosen no document of the time says; the later explanations by way of a brook or of broken land were thought up after the English took over.
The place counts 10,779 residents, of whom 25 per cent are over sixty-five.