English

‘Be welcome in these damned dunes‘
PAULUS LOOT WAS THE FOUNDER OF PRESENT-DAY ZANDVOORT

On November 6th 2022 it was exactly three hundred years ago that the extremely wealthy Amsterdam merchant Paulus Loot bought the village ‘Heerlijkheid Zandvoort’ and the dunes around it at a public auction. That anniversary was the start of the Paulus Loot Year that will end on September 27th 2023. That is the day that he was born in Amsterdam 350 years ago.

Zandvoort is first mentioned around 1100, when it was called ‘Sandevoerde’ and later ‘Santvoort’. Until the seventeenth century, the ‘Lords of Brederode’ ruled the village. When the eighteenth Lord of Brederode, Wolfert, died unmarried and childless in 1679, the legal bloodline of the important noble House Brederode died out and the properties went to the state.

On September 6th, 1722 the government put Zandvoort up for auction. At that same auction the towns of Bloemendaal, Overveen and Vogelenzang were sold to Haarlem. Hillegom was bought by the famous Amsterdam family Six, and Paulus Loot paid 14.640 guilders for the ‘Heerlijkheid Zandvoort’. That may seem like a great buy, but Zandvoort was no paradise. It was a small, miserable community where the people barely scraped by with fishing and growing dune potatoes. The rich Paulus Loot was welcomed with the words “Be welcome in these damned dunes…” The original sale receipt is kept at the North-Holland Archive and was recently put on show briefly at the Zandvoorts Museum for the first time.

Loot was a very successful and versatile business man. He traded in weapons, pearls and other jewels, was a banker in Lisbon where he lent money to the Portuguese king, and in 1721 he was one of the first to introduce an extremely advanced wood saw mill in Portugal. There is no information that Paulus Loot was involved in the slave trade, but it cannot be ruled out. It is certain that his involvement put Zandvoort on the road to more prosperity and development.

Paulus Loot died on October 14th, 1753 when he was eighty, which was astronomically old for that time. Five days later he was laid to rest in the tomb that he had built in the (now protestant) church in Zandvoort twenty five years earlier. The tomb remains in the church to this day and an endoscopic investigation this year has confirmed that Paulus Loot is still in in it.

In spite of his wealth and prominence, not much more is known about Paulus Loot, strangely. There are no pictures of him and much of his life is a mystery. Everything we know about him, can be found on this site (in Dutch..sorry). 

The Paulus Loot Year is an initiative by fellow-villager Walter Sans. Together with Hilly Jansen (Zandvoorts Museum), Gillis Kok (Zandvoortse Courant) and Joan Bergmans (StudioArtworks) he tells the story about Paulus Loot. Also, he asks everyone who has more information about Paulus Loot to contact him.