Goes was founded in the tenth century on the edge of a creek called de Korte Gos - the Short Gos - from which it took its name. By the early twelfth century it had a market square and a parish church dedicated to Mary Magdalene. By 1300 it had a brick castle, now called Oostende Castle. The city rights came in 1405, granted by William II, Duke of Bavaria, in his role as Count of Holland; town walls followed in 1417. Prosperity came from the unglamorous but valuable industries of cloth and salt. Then in the sixteenth century everything went wrong at once: the harbor channel silted up, the cloth industry collapsed, and in 1554 a large fire destroyed part of the city. Goes was beginning a long slide from prominence when the Eighty Years' War arrived.

In August 1572, with the Sea Beggars in revolt and most of Zeeland turned against Spain, the Spanish garrison of Goes - commanded by Isidro Pacheco - was besieged by Anglo-Dutch forces under Jerome Tseraarts, including 1,500 English troops commanded by Thomas Morgan and Humphrey Gilbert. Reinforcement by sea was impossible because the Sea Beggar fleet controlled the water. So Captain Plomaert, a Fleming loyal to Spain, proposed wading across the Oosterschelde at low tide. The plan was approved. Three thousand pikemen of the Spanish, Walloon, and German tercios under Cristóbal de Mondragón crossed the tidal flats overnight. The Anglo-Dutch troops withdrew without a real fight when the relief column appeared. Five years later in 1577, the Spanish garrison itself was finally driven out by Prince Maurice of Nassau, who built the city walls that still partly stand.

From the seventeenth century onward, Goes simply was not central to anything. Agriculture was the work, and the work was steady - the rich clay soil of Zuid-Beveland is some of the best farmland in the Netherlands - but cities elsewhere grew while Goes stayed flat. A railway arrived in 1868, threading the Roosendaal-Vlissingen line through town, but it failed to bring the industrialization that came to Rotterdam and the inland cities. The Netherlands was neutral in the First World War, but seven bombs hit Goes and the neighboring village of Kloetinge after a British plane navigated badly; a house on Magdalenastraat was destroyed and one person was killed. In the Second World War, Goes was occupied but mostly undamaged, freed in 1944 by Allied forces moving up from Antwerp.

Real growth finally came in the 1970s and 1980s, with new neighborhoods - Goese Meer, Oostmolenpark, Overzuid, Ouverture - built on the polder edge. The city became the fourth-largest economic center in Zeeland, a regional service hub that still hangs onto its medieval bones. The grote kerk dedicated to Mary Magdalene stands at the center of town, with the seventeenth-century town hall facing the market square. The Stoomtrein Goes-Borsele - a heritage steam railway - runs vintage trains south to Hoedekenskerke through the polders, and the historic Klokstraat at the edge of the old town once served as the terminus of the steam tram line that connected Goes to its hinterland. New housing districts called Goese Schans, Mannee, and Aria are now being built, with plans for 3,000 more houses.

Goes has produced an unlikely number of consequential people for its size. C. H. D. Buys Ballot, born in the neighboring village of Kloetinge in 1817, was the meteorologist who discovered the law that bears his name - the principle that in the Northern Hemisphere, standing with your back to the wind, low pressure lies on your left. The principle made weather forecasting possible. Bas van Fraassen, the philosopher of science, was born here in 1941. Cornelis Caesar, who left Goes as a young man, became governor of Dutch Formosa in the seventeenth century. And Consus, who won the 2023 GeoGuessr World Cup by identifying random Google Street View locations with uncanny precision, is also from Goes - a fitting modern descendant of the meteorologist who taught the world to read invisible currents in the air.