It’s time to celebrate ‘the second Adam’

HARDERWIJK is on the edge of the Veluwemeer, the long neck of the Zuiderzee, at the dead centre of the Netherlands.

It was once a port of the Hanseatic League, but only pleasure boats visit the place nowadays.

This attractive little town, with picturesque lanes and churches, boasts the largest marine-mammal park in Europe; bottle-nosed dolphins and enormous walruses frolic in huge artificial loughs. But the place has another claim to fame: the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus visited it back in 1635.