Geography
Nord is part of the current Nord-Pas-de-Calais region and is surrounded by the French departments of Pas-de-Calais and Aisne, as well as by Belgium and the North Sea.
Situated in the north of the country along the western half of the Belgian frontier, the department is unusually long and narrow. Its principal city is Lille, which with nearby Roubaix, Tourcoing and Villeneuve d'Ascq constitutes the center of a cluster of industrial and former mining towns totalling slightly over a million inhabitants. Other important cities are Valenciennes, Douai, and Dunkirk. The principal rivers are the following:
Yser, Lys, Escaut, Scarpe, Sambre
North sea West Flanders, Belgium |
West Flanders, Belgium | Hainaut, Belgium | ||
Pas-de-Calais | Hainaut, Belgium | |||
Nord | ||||
Somme | Aisne | Hainaut, Belgium |
Read more about this topic: Nord (French Department)
Famous quotes containing the word geography:
“The California fever is not likely to take us off.... There is neither romance nor glory in digging for gold after the manner of the pictures in the geography of diamond washing in Brazil.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (18221893)
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Ktaadn, near which we were to pass the next day, is said to mean Highest Land. So much geography is there in their names.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)