Giethoorn

I’ll be honest about my prejudice going in: Giethoorn is so relentlessly described as a fairy-tale village that I assumed it would be insufferable — a place that exists for photographs and nothing else. It is, undeniably, a place people come to photograph. But it’s also a real village in the province of Overijssel where the original old core genuinely has no roads, where the houses sit on more than a hundred and seventy little islands, and where the bridges and the boats aren’t a theme but simply how people have gotten around since the peat-diggers dug the canals centuries ago, hauling out turf and leaving water behind.

Lia and I rented a small electric “whisper boat” — fluisterboot — which is exactly what it sounds like, a quiet little punt you steer yourself at a walking pace. The man who handed it over gave us about forty seconds of instruction and shoved us off, and the first five minutes were pure comedy as I worked out that a tiller steers backward from your instinct. Lia did not let me forget this.

Steering yourself through someone’s front garden

The pleasure of Giethoorn is that you move through it at the speed of water. We drifted down the main canal, under the high arched footbridges — there are over a hundred and seventy of them — past thatched farmhouses whose gardens come right down to the waterline, immaculate little lawns and rose bushes and the occasional resident drinking coffee three meters away, entirely unbothered by the boats sliding past their breakfast.

In the middle of a summer day, I won’t lie, the main waterway gets busy — tour boats, day-trippers, a genuine boat jam where everyone has to be very Dutch and patient about it. But we’d been told to push out beyond the village center into the surrounding lakes and reed marshes of the Weerribben-Wieden, the largest peat marsh in northwestern Europe, and that’s where it got good. Within twenty minutes the crowds vanished and it was just reeds, herons, the put-put of the little motor, and an enormous flat sky doing the things Dutch skies do.

When the day-trippers leave

We made the mistake, or rather the excellent decision, of staying overnight. By six in the evening the tour boats were gone, the village exhaled, and the canals went glassy and quiet. We walked the footpaths — you can cross the whole old village on foot and bridge alone — and ate eel and local cheese at a waterside spot where the owner clearly preferred the evening people to the daytime crowds and said so.

That’s the trick with Giethoorn, and I’d stake my reputation on it: come for the night, or at least stay until evening. The version of this village that earns the fairy-tale clichés only appears once the last bus has left and the water goes still and you have a footbridge entirely to yourself.

When to go: Late spring and early autumn — May, June, September — give you green surroundings and long light without the deepest summer crush. July and August are genuinely crowded at midday; if you must come then, be on the water before ten or after five. Winter is quiet and occasionally freezes hard enough to skate the canals, which is the village’s other, older self.