''IF you stand beside the Bath Pavilion, and look to your right, you can still see this,'' said Francisca van Vloten, her finger tracing the lines of the long, wooden wave breakers jutting into the North Sea in the print of Mondrian's 1909 painting ''Beach With Five Piers at Domburg.''''You have to use your imagination,'' said Ms. van Vloten, an art historian and curator at the Marie Tak van Poortvliet Museum in the Dutch town of Domburg, ''because of the modern buildings there now.''

But standing on the dunes an hour later, the coast of Zeeland (the westernmost province of the Netherlands) appeared little changed from Mondrian's day. The grasses thrashed, the wind whipped up small, choppy waves and children screamed as they raced to the water, doing awkward back flips into the sea. Behind me stood the Bath Pavilion, a grand bathing house that once drew European aristocrats and royalty, attracted by the curative powers of the area's salt water and mythical light. Straddling the bright orange bicycle rented from my hostel, I felt glamorous in its shadow.

From 1908 to 1916, Mondrian spent summers (and some winters) in Domburg, before moving to New York in 1940. During his years in Domburg, it was an artists' colony centered on the charismatic, Indonesian-born painter Jan Toorop, a leading figure in Dutch Luminism, and one of the most celebrated painters in Europe at the time. After seeing an exhibition of Toorop's work in Amsterdam, the 36-year-old Mondrian went to Zeeland and joined its community of artists. It was there, a century ago, that Mondrian began to move away from the naturalism of his younger years (earnest farmscapes, brown churches and gray lighthouses) and establish himself as an abstract painter who dealt in geometric compositions and primary colors.

Domburg is in many ways a quintessentially, almost stereotypically, Dutch town: brick streets, tiled roofs, daffodil-yellow shutters. Set on the Walcheren peninsula of the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt river delta in Zeeland, the town's coast of powdery beach is backed by a tall barrier of grassy dunes and what is known as the Manteling, a thick grove of odd, misshapen trees, which twist and turn into tunnels.

The area, sprinkled with small sandy islands, is sheltered from the violent North Sea by one of the great engineering feats of the 20th century: the dams, sluices, locks, dikes, levees and storm-surge barriers known as the Delta Works. Like the Panama Canal and the Golden Gate Bridge, this system is one of the American Society of Civil Engineers' Seven Wonders of the World -- an effort to tame nature that is so impressive visitors come just to see it.

I arrived by train from Amsterdam, catching only glimpses of the Delta Works. During the two-hour journey, the train barreled past the graffitied suburbs of Rotterdam and Haarlem and the sturdy livestock and squat windmills of the Dutch countryside, before arriving at Middelburg, Zeeland's provincial capital, a short bus ride from the coast. The bus driver didn't speak English, which is rare in the Netherlands, where English is almost considered a second language. But he winked and grinned from his oversize rearview mirror as he tried to decipher my pantomimed attempts to tell him where I wanted to stop. We overshot my hostel, and I was deposited on the shoulder of a rural highway -- pasture to my right, forest to my left -- just as rain began to fall. I dragged my roller bag 10 minutes down the road to a gravel lane covered by a tunnel of knobby trees, following signs for Kasteel Westhove, the 12th-century castle about a mile outside Domburg where I had reserved a bed.

I didn't know what to expect from Westhove, now a 20-euro-a-night hostel with bunk-bed dorms and rental towels (about $24 at $1.21 to the euro). But when the castle came into view, I flashed back on a lifetime of Disney movies. The storm bore down, throwing off threads of dark clouds and sheets of spitting rain, like the dark winged god in ''Fantasia.'' In the near distance, the castle was an eerie and unnerving Bald Mountain -- an imposing stone structure, encircled by a mote of ink-black water with cylindrical towers rising above the surrounding trees. I crossed Westhove's stone bridge, passed its wooden stockade and took shelter from the Zeeland sky.

Were it not for the low, arched doorways and unusually steep and narrow staircases, which were treacherous after a glass of Kasteel (the potent, fittingly named Belgian ale that I ordered at the hostel bar), the interior of Westhove could have been that of any other hostel, anywhere in the world. It had the same sanitized, prefab furniture and teenagers acting like teenagers, the same aging hippies floating through, their clothes swooshing, bracelets jingling.

I sat out the rain at Westhove's bar. On a Monday afternoon, it was just me and the bartender, Michiel Paalvast, a local artist who told me that he had gone to art school in Rotterdam and returned to Zeeland to paint. When the canopy of clouds finally lifted, I understood what had drawn him back to Walcheren. The light, Mr. Paalvast said, is ''myth and science at the same time.''