Confused? Baarle has a system to help. The border is marked on the town’s pavements with white crosses and metal studs. Outside Den Engel, a cafe, visitors can stand with a glass of wine in the Netherlands and lean over a white cross to drink it in Belgium. When closing times differed in the two countries, divided restaurants would move their tables to the Belgian side of the room when last call came on the Dutch side.

Addresses go by the voordeurregel, or front-door rule: If it opens on the Belgian side of a street, you live in Belgium, wherever the rest of the house may lie. (For easy identification, the national flag is usually painted next to the house number.) A shop like De Biergrens, with entrances in both countries, gets an address for each door.

The intertwined halves of the town — formally, the Belgian parts are Baarle-Hertog and the Dutch parts Baarle-Nassau — have separate town halls, churches and fire departments, but they recently merged their police departments. None of this bothers people at De Biergrens, which is slightly more in the Netherlands but sells mostly Belgian beer. “Yes, we have two addresses, two telephones and two cash registers,” said Karlean Vermonden, an employee. “But it’s not a problem. That’s just a way of life here.”