In addition to port facilities in Nieuwpoort and Ostend, the Belgian city of Bruges has an extensive seaport and navigable inland canal network that was an important center of naval trade from the middle ages all the way to the second half of the twentieth century. Ghent and Antwerp also have extensive port facilities (Antwerp, for example, was particularly important during the Second World War) however both only access the sea through the the Scheldt estuary, which is technically in the Netherlands; no small problem, exemplified by the way that in in the First World War, shipping through Antwerp and Ghent was easily stopped the Germans, who held the wide estuary's eastern bank.