Castles in the Sand: Their Grandeur Is No Delusion

Marjon Katerberg grew up, but she never stopped building sandcastles by the sea. And in an age of new technologies and new economies, the 37-year-old Dutch woman makes her living with the simplest building material there is--sand. But she operates on a scale most people can hardly imagine, using tens of thousands of tons of the stuff to create the world’s most exotic sand sculptures.

Now she has put the finishing touches on her latest creation: the largest sand sculpture park in the world. On the outskirts of The Hague, Katerberg and 88 professional sandcastle builders have just completed a Japanese-themed park of 28 buildings and sculptures.

With a price tag of nearly half a million dollars, the site stretches over several acres and was built with a lot more than buckets and spades.

More than 200,000 people are expected to visit the park during the summer months before it gets bulldozed this fall.

Planned with architectural precision over the course of a year, the park was sculpted over a period of two weeks by sand artists who worked around the clock. They perched on mounds of sand some 45 feet high in order to carve the shapeless masses into intricate Japanese sculptures. As they worked, drinking straws from a local fast food chain poked from their mouths: essential tools to blow off the excess sand.

The attention to detail is extraordinary: Fire gushes from the mouth of a Japanese dragon made entirely of sand. Nearby, water trickles down the front of a Japanese temple, while against the sunset a samurai warrior and his geisha look out to sea.

“The beauty of sand is that it’s so flexible,” said Katerberg, who has made sandcastles her living for the past 10 years. “You can do pretty much any kind of sculpture with it.”

After being involved in several European and world record bids for the tallest and best-designed sandcastles, Katerberg now heads a team of professional nomads.

Many of her fellow sand sculptors are architects or have moved over from sculpting in other, more permanent, materials. Coming from places as diverse as Denmark, Ireland and the United States, many have given up their regular jobs for the summer to devote themselves to sand.

Although the Dutch coast has enough sand to make billions of castles, its quality is lacking for this kind of project, and the park’s designers had to truck in 1,400 loads of special sand.

“We need very young river sand,” said civil engineering student Martin Tedder, who took time off from designing bridges. “The grain is a bit square, and it has not been eroded by wind or water. It’s like working with millions of tiny building blocks.”

This is the second year Almeerderzand has hosted a sand sculpting festival. But this year’s efforts were hindered by a problem with which any 5-year-old would be familiar: rain.

For nearly two weeks, rain poured down, threatening the stability of the sculptures. The crew watched helplessly as parts of their statues washed away.

But sand sculptors are tough . . . and they’re in touch with their inner child: “It’s like when you were building as a child on the beach and something collapsed,” Katerberg said. “Well, you just look at it and go on from that and say, ‘Oh, I can go on and make something else from this.’ It’s OK, as long as you are together and see the bright side of it.”

The Almeerderzand park will last only a few weeks. Rain will loosen the structures, and they will have to be bulldozed before they become hazardously unstable.

But that doesn’t bother Katerberg. She’ll be back next year, to build an even bigger park.

In the meantime, she and her nomadic army of sculptors are off to their next project--a recreation of the wilds of Africa . . . in Belgium.