2½ Euro - Schiedam de Walvisch

Schiedam's De Walvisch distillery, founded in 1640, was one of hundreds of jenever producers that made the city the undisputed center of Dutch gin production for over two centuries. By the late twentieth century, the industry had collapsed to a fraction of its former scale, and this 1998 issue belongs to the Nederlandse Euromunten series of 2½ euro town and trade commemoratives — a program that functioned more as civic documentation than celebration, recording what the Netherlands had largely already lost.