Giethoorn

The village is first mentioned in 1225, and its name appears as "Gethorne" in 1230. Local tradition says its first settlers found the horns of goats drowned in the great storm flood of 1170 — a goat's horn is on the village coat of arms — though linguists read "hoorn" as a spit of land jutting into the water. The settlement moved several times, the last time in the 17th century, when it shifted from a dyke road to the line of today's Dorpsgracht and took on the character of a water village.

Peat was the reason for its canals. Villagers dug ditches and channels to carry the cut turf away, and farms grew up on the strips of land between them, reached by footbridges high enough for punters and hay-laden boats to pass underneath. The punter, a flat-bottomed boat pushed with a pole, was used for every kind of transport, including weddings and funerals, while larger flat boats carried milk churns, hay, peat and reed; boats also took villagers to Steenwijk, Meppel, Zwartsluis and Blokzijl. Over the centuries so much peat was dug that lakes formed; storm floods in 1775, 1776 and 1825 broke the narrow strips between the diggings and created the Bovenwijde.

Peat cutting ended around 1950. Giethoorn was a municipality until 1973, then part of Brederwiede, and since 2001 has belonged to Steenwijkerland. Bert Haanstra's comedy Fanfare, filmed here in 1958 and seen by 2.6 million people, made the village famous, and tourism has grown ever since.

Giethoorn's culture is its water culture. The village developed its own boat types, the Gieterse punter best known among them, and people cut reed and other water plants for thatching alongside farming and peat digging. Its typical building is the bultrugboerderij, the "hump-backed farm", whose barn rises higher than the house in front, so the roofline seems to have a hump. The local dialect name for the village in Stellingwerfs is Gietern.

Faith here has a Mennonite stamp: the first church, in the 14th century, was Catholic, but Mennonites were long a strong presence, and their village church, De Vermaning, dates from 1871. Fanfare, the 1958 film about two rival brass bands in an invented village, remains part of local identity, and a restaurant on the Binnenpad still screens it.

Since the 1970s foreign visitors have come too, first from Germany and Belgium. A marketing campaign from 2005 promoted the village to China's growing middle class, and in the 2010s visitor numbers from China rose sharply — bus signs and timetables were translated into Mandarin. In 2015 Giethoorn won a place on the board of an international edition of Monopoly. The village is widely nicknamed the "Venice of the Netherlands".

Giethoorn had about 2,800 inhabitants in 2020, spread along a long, thin village divided into the Noordeinde, Middenbuurt and Zuideinde. Tourism shapes village life: estimates in 2020 put visitor numbers at one to one and a half million a year, an enormous number for a place of its size.

Farming changed long ago. From 1928 the marshy land of a new polder was reclaimed with the help of unemployed workers, creating modern farms without the old water-borne way of working, run mostly by farmers from other parts of the country. A new housing estate has grown on the northern edge of the Giethoornsche Polder.

Many houses stand on what are in effect small islands, reached only by footbridges, and most of the village's more than 176 bridges are privately owned. The old village has no through road; boats and the cycle path do the work, and the punter has largely given way to motor boats. Summer brings the heaviest crowds to the narrow paths and canals.

Giethoorn has no long list of dishes of its own. Its best-known local treat is the Gieterse soes, a cream puff served with coffee in the village's cafés; Restaurant Fanfare on the Binnenpad, named after the 1958 film and still screening it, serves lunch and dinner as well as coffee with a soes. Eating out mostly happens in old farmhouses along the Dorpsgracht that have become restaurants and tearooms, some with terraces at the water's edge and boats for hire alongside.

The food of the wider area is the farmhouse cooking of the eastern Netherlands: stamppot, mashed potato beaten with kale, sauerkraut or endive and served with smoked sausage, and pea soup.

Bread with cheese is the usual lunch, as across the country, snack bars sell bitterballen and kroketten, and the sweet side runs to poffertjes, the little Dutch pancakes, and syrup-filled stroopwafels. For a wider choice, Steenwijk, Meppel and Zwolle have more restaurants within easy reach.