Kamperland has 36 places, of which 21 give opening hours, 58 per cent. Of those, 10 per cent work past eleven. A website of their own is held by 89 per cent, the highest of these fourteen places, and 11 per cent have no online presence.
The by-law of this municipality does something we seldom see: for the premises themselves it sets no night closing hour. What is regulated is only the terraces, which must be shut between midnight and seven, and a refreshment corner inside a shop, which follows that shop’s hours.
That high website figure suits what is earned here. Kamperland lies on the Veerse Meer, with holiday parks and a marina at the village edge, and whoever lives off booked guests is findable online. Proof that is not, but it is the logical reading.
The water it lives off was made. Until the closing of the Veerse Gat in 1961 this was a sea inlet and Noord-Beveland a real island; the dam turned it into a lake and joined it to Walcheren.
On the table lie mussels and oysters. A European protected name they do not have: the Zeeland mussel carries a Dutch regional mark, which is a different thing. The place counts 2,223 residents, of whom 31 per cent are over sixty-five.