Around 1230, a group of religious refugees from the Mediterranean arrived in this stretch of peat country and stayed. They were Flagellants, a movement defined by extreme self-mortification of the flesh, who had fled some southern persecution to reach the wettest, emptiest land they could find. Whatever drove them, they made Giethoorn the first village ever built on Dutch peatland. The buildings sat on small raised islands of harder ground; everything between was waterlogged moss and bog. For centuries after, the inhabitants made their living by digging out the peat under their feet and selling it for fuel. The canals were not built first and then settled around. They are the empty trenches left behind where peat used to be. So are the lakes.

The local farmhouse has a name and a shape that survives nowhere else. It is called a bultrugboerderij, which means roughly hunchback farmhouse, because the barn behind is taller than the dwelling in front, giving the silhouette a distinctive hump. They have thatched roofs that come almost to the ground and tiny gardens between the canal and the front door. To move anything, hay, livestock, building materials, groceries, a coffin, the inhabitants used the punter: a long, narrow, flat-bottomed wooden boat poled along by hand. The boats are still everywhere, now mostly carrying tourists. The village is built in a long strip across three settlements, Noordeinde in the north, Middenbuurt in the middle, Zuideinde in the south, all stitched together by the central Dorpsgracht canal.

In 1958, the Dutch filmmaker Bert Haanstra came to Giethoorn to shoot a comedy called Fanfare, about two rival village brass bands. The film made the village famous across the Netherlands almost overnight, and the canals and punters became part of the country's sense of itself. Visitors started arriving. Then, in the 2010s, something unexpected happened. Chinese travellers discovered Giethoorn in extraordinary numbers, drawn by social media posts that called it a fairytale and the most romantic place in Europe. Bus signs and timetables were translated into Mandarin. On peak summer days, the population can multiply by twenty or thirty. The village has spent years trying to balance the income from tourism against the simple need to live in one's own home without having a stranger's phone in the window.

The standard visitor experience is to rent a small electric-powered punter and steer yourself slowly through the canals at the speed of a brisk walking pace. Anyone can manage it. The water is shallow, the boats are forgiving, and the canals are largely one-way by polite convention. Inland from the village, the Weerribben-Wieden National Park spreads across one of the largest wetlands in northwestern Europe, easily explored by the same kind of boat. Two well-marked cycle routes, the Giethoorn-Weerribben at 46 kilometres and the Giethoorn-Wieden at 35, take you past more thatched cottages and more reed beds than you will find in most countries. The best advice, if you can manage it, is to come outside peak season, stay overnight, and walk the village in the early morning before the day-trippers arrive. The bridges are quieter then. So are the punters.