The 2010s were a busy decade for Dutch municipal consolidation. The national government decided that smaller municipalities lacked the capacity to take on services — youth care, planning, environmental enforcement — that were being decentralised from The Hague. Naarden, Bussum, and Muiden ranged from roughly 17,000 to 33,000 inhabitants each. Together they crossed the policy threshold and shed three town halls for one. The new boundary did something geographically odd: the Naarden and Bussum halves sit firmly in the Gooi region with its sand-ridge dry forest, while the Muiden half lies in the Vechtstreek polders to the west. One municipality now straddles two distinct Dutch landscapes. The Vecht river still empties into the IJmeer at Muiden. The northern end of the old Hollandic Water Line still terminates there. The merger paperwork could not change geography.

Naarden was first listed as Naruthi on a Frankish document dated 887. It is the oldest named settlement in the Gooi and the only one to receive city rights, in 1300. After the Spaniards burned it during the Eighty Years' War, the Dutch rebuilt it in star-shaped bastions and ravelins — six of each, geometrically obsessive, defensively brilliant. The walls are still here, still walkable. Every Good Friday since the early twentieth century the Grote Kerk has hosted a performance of Bach's St Matthew Passion that draws audiences from across Europe. The town has produced a remarkable line of figures: Salomon van Ruysdael, the Dutch Golden Age landscape painter; Pieter Merkus, who became Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies in 1841; and most poignantly Willem Arondeus, the artist and writer born here in 1894, who joined the Dutch resistance during the Nazi occupation, helped bomb the Amsterdam population registry to thwart deportations, and was executed in 1943. His last reported words asked that people know that homosexuals are not cowards.

Bussum was founded around the year 1000 and did almost nothing in particular for the next nine hundred years. Then the Amsterdam-Amersfoort railway arrived in 1874. A station went in for both Bussum and Naarden, the wealthy moved out from Amsterdam to build neighborhoods like 't Spiegel, and the town began its quiet transformation into a commuter suburb. In the 1950s, Studio Irene in Bussum broadcast the first Dutch public television program — a quiet first that the town has mostly forgotten. The artists came too: Frederik van Eeden, the writer and psychiatrist, founded his Walden colony here, inspired by Thoreau. The poet Herman Gorter lived in town. Today Bussum is one of the older municipalities in the Netherlands by average age and the home of a particular kind of Dutch celebrity who grew up here and either left to work in Hilversum or stayed and worked from home. The novelist Tessa de Loo, the comedian Youp van 't Hek, the children's writer Paul Biegel were all born in Bussum.

Muiden sits where the Vecht meets the IJmeer, and it has done so since at least the thirteenth century, when the Muiderslot was built to control river traffic into Utrecht. The castle is still here, moated and turreted, with a museum that walks visitors through eight centuries of siege and counter-siege. Just offshore lies Pampus, an artificial island built in the 1880s as a fortification within the Defence Line of Amsterdam — Stelling van Amsterdam — designed to flood the surrounding polders against advancing armies. It worked exactly never, because no advancing army ever came at the right angle. Today Pampus is a museum reached by ferry. Muiderberg, the smaller village a few kilometers east, gave the municipality the basketball player Lucas Steijn. Muiden itself produced Willem Cornelisz van Muyden, a sixteenth-century ship's carpenter and mariner, and the rabbi Abraham Samson Onderwijzer, a leader of Dutch Jewry born in 1862.

For a municipality of 58,000, Gooise Meren produces an improbable number of athletes. Tineke Lagerberg won bronze at the 1960 Rome Olympics. Anneloes Nieuwenhuizen took team gold in field hockey at Los Angeles 1984. Wouter Jolie took silver at London 2012. Ferry Weertman won gold in the 10K open-water swim at Rio 2016. The Coronel twins, Tim and Tom, are Dutch racing drivers born in Naarden in 1972. Ruud Hesp kept goal for major Dutch clubs across 504 professional appearances. Marlous Pieete won 51 caps for the Netherlands women's national football team. The pattern is suspicious enough to mention: a town that built its modern identity on broadcasting and money has quietly turned out a generation of Olympians without anyone outside it really noticing.