Het Gooi sits on something rare for the Netherlands: dry sand. The northernmost tail of the Utrecht Hill Ridge surfaces just east of Amsterdam, lifting a few dozen meters above sea level and dressing itself in oak, beech, and heath. To the west, the Vechtstreek does what most of the country does — flat polders, slow rivers, the river Vecht curling north past country estates that wealthy seventeenth-century Amsterdammers built when sand quarrying for their city was reshaping the land. The two halves of the region have always belonged together by railway and culture more than by geology. Hilversum anchors the dry side. Weesp anchors the wet. Between them is some of the most cycled countryside in the country.

Hilversum is the country's broadcasting capital, home to the two largest television studios in Europe. The Dutch call it Hillywood with the smirk of people who use the joke and the place at once. The radio industry settled here in 1918 around the NSF factory; television followed; the public broadcasters of AVRO, VARA, KRO, NCRV and others built their headquarters in the leafy villa neighborhoods that the railway had already filled with rich Amsterdammers. Every spring during Eurovision, the Dutch points are announced from a studio here. Walk through the center and the celebrities are not famous-to-foreigners, but they are famous-to-the-rest-of-the-country, which is a particular kind of awkward fame that the Gooi understands better than anywhere else in the Netherlands.

Naarden is the region's astonishment for first-time visitors. The seventeenth-century star-shaped fortifications are among the best preserved in Europe, six bastions and six ravelins still walking the original geometry. Bach's St Matthew Passion is performed in the Grote Kerk every Good Friday, a tradition older than most modern democracies. Weesp, smaller and quieter, kept its medieval bones. Muiden, on the IJmeer, has the moated Muiderslot — a thirteenth-century castle that looks more like a postcard than the postcards do. The three towns formed part of the Dutch Water Line, the deliberate flooding strategy that kept invaders out of the heart of Holland for centuries. The polders that defended Amsterdam are still here, drained now, mostly grazed by cows.

Drive a few kilometers east of Hilversum and the houses get larger, the hedges higher, the cars quieter. Laren and Blaricum are villages where Statistics Netherlands consistently logs the richest residents in the country. They were small farming hamlets until the 1880s, when a tram line connected them to the train, and an artists' colony gathered around Anton Mauve — the painter who taught Vincent van Gogh — along with Jan Sluijters and the American collector William Singer, whose collection became the Singer Laren museum. The painters left a softer mark than what came next: television presenters, retired executives, people who got rich during the dot-com years, the cast and crew of a hit drama called Gooische Vrouwen that fixed the region's reputation for the rest of the country. There is a phrase, Gooisch parkeren — Gooi parking — for what happens when an expensive SUV stops wherever it likes. Locals know the joke. So does everyone else.

Hilversum is the rail hub, with intercity service to Amsterdam, Schiphol, Utrecht and Almere, plus six daily trains to Berlin. Weesp, Naarden and Bussum sit on the Sprinter line. After that, buses thin out and bikes take over. The Vechtstreek is best on two wheels, gliding along the river past country estates that have not changed much since the Golden Age. The Gooi side rewards a longer day: cross the Natuurbrug Zanderij Crailo — the longest wildlife crossing in the world at 800 meters, spanning a motorway, a railway, a business park and a sports complex — and you can ride from the heaths of Hilversum to the fortress walls of Naarden without ever feeling the city. Bring a thermos. The pancake houses in nearby Lage Vuursche do the rest.