In which country was the first Wiki Loves Monuments contest held?

The first Wiki Loves Monuments contest was held in the Netherlands. It began there in 2010 as a pilot photography project focused on Dutch national heritage sites, known as Rijksmonumenten.

The contest invited participants to photograph listed monuments and upload their images to Wikimedia Commons under free licenses. That approach served two purposes: it documented cultural heritage visually and supplied freely reusable photographs for Wikipedia and other projects. The Dutch pilot followed the earlier Wiki Loves Art project, also held in the Netherlands in 2009.

The pilot’s success encouraged Wikimedia communities elsewhere in Europe to organize a much larger event in 2011. From that point, Wiki Loves Monuments became an international annual competition. The Netherlands therefore appears both as the birthplace of the contest and as one of its recurring participating countries—not merely as one country among the later competitors.