<div>

The idea might have started as a tongue-in-cheek remark by a newspaper columnist, but now architects, engineers, construction firms and investors are giving serious consideration to building a 2,000-metre-high artificial mountain in the Netherlands.

In the Dutch daily paper De Pers, former athlete Thijs Zonneveld joked that his fellow countrymen should build their own mountain -- complete with alpine slopes, meadows and villages -- in the notoriously flat plains of the Netherlands (the highest point is just 323m above sea level).


But the day his column went live, Zonneveld received serious responses from experts who had already been mulling over the concept. "It made me realise I was not the only one who'd had that idea," Zonneveld told Reuters.

Now his idea has snowballed -- the Dutch Ski Association, Dutch Climbing and Mountaineering Association and Royal Dutch Cycling Union have shown their support, the architect firm Hoffers and Kruger has drawn up plans for the mountain and a work group has assembled to assess feasibility.

The project is provisionally named "Die Berg Komt Er", ("The Mountain Comes"), Yahoo News reports, and will apparently take 30 years and anywhere between £40bn and £270bn to build. Once done, the monster green peak could hide swimming pools, cinemas, sports facilities and its own water supply.

It's an audacious idea, but Zonneveld insists that the plan is serious: "All kinds of big companies have now stepped in, various municipalities and investors are interested."


It's not the first man-made mountain to be proposed. In 2009, German architect Jakob Tigges wanted to erect a 1,000-metre-high mountain at a disused airport in Berlin.

As challenges set in, Tigges has settled for a 60-metre mound.

Don't miss: Stadium-sized artificial floating volcano aims to fix Earth's climate

