According to local legend, the low ridge of sand at the heart of the village - a feature the Dutch call a donk or morre - was formed when the mythical giant Hillegonda accidentally dropped sand from her torn apron. She built her house on the pile and the village took its name: Hillegonda's mountain, Hillegersberg. The image of the giant with her ripped apron still appears on the neighbourhood's coat of arms. The likelier explanation, courtesy of geographers, is that Hillegersberg was named after Hildegard of Flanders, wife of Count Dirk II of Holland (who lived 920-988). Either way, by the year 990 a church had been built on the ridge and people had begun gathering around it. Excavations have turned up flint tools from prehistoric inhabitants, Roman pottery, even a Roman bust of Emperor Hadrian - reminders that this small rise in an otherwise pancake-flat landscape has been catching humans' eye for at least two thousand years.

A castle was first mentioned in writing on 2 November 1269, in a certificate documenting a loan from one Vranke Stozep van Hildegardsberg. By 1343 it belonged to Heer Kerstant van den Berge. Then, in 1426, both castle and church were destroyed by the armies of Jacoba of Bavaria during the Hook and Cod wars - a century-long civil war between two factions of the Dutch nobility that has been called the most pointless internal conflict in medieval European history. The castle was not rebuilt. Its dungeon stones, however, can still be found tucked into a corner of the cemetery next to the Hillegondakerk, the church that replaced the destroyed medieval one around 1500 and still stands today. The site has been a Dutch national monument since September 1973.

If you walk through Hillegersberg today you cross a landscape of glittering open water - the Bergse Plassen, the lakes that give the neighbourhood its character. These look ancient. They are not. Between roughly 1600 and 1700, peat cutters dug out the moist soil for fuel, then the pits flooded with groundwater. The lakes are what's left of the peat that's already been burnt. By the early twentieth century the neighbourhood had grown from a village of 2,000 in 1885 to 7,000 in 1904, attracted by the water, the parks, and the easy commute to Rotterdam's centre. Plaswijckpark opened in the 1920s and remains a recreation ground today; part of it is grazed by Scottish Highland cattle. In 1941, during the German occupation, Hillegersberg was finally absorbed completely into Rotterdam - one of many surrounding villages the growing port-city annexed in the twentieth century.

Hillegersberg held onto its independence longer than most. Its first town hall, built in 1752 at 10 Kerkstraat in the old village core, is now a restaurant. Its last town hall, the Buitenlust Villa on the C.N.A. Looslaan, was built in 1884 in neo-Renaissance style by the architect J.J. van Waning and commissioned by the wealthy De Kat family - it served as town hall from 1921 until annexation in 1941, then became the office of the Hillegersberg-Schiebroek borough, and today houses a nursery and a wedding venue. Both buildings are national monuments. Walk a few streets in any direction and you find the rest of what survived: the Prinsenmolen windmill turning over the River Rotte, the curved Boterdorpsebrug lock bridge, three small shopping streets (Bergse Dorpsstraat, the Kleiweg, Van Beethovensingel) that locals defend fiercely against retail chain encroachment. The Japanese School of Rotterdam, opened here in 1996, serves the families of executives from Japanese trading companies in the city. Celebrity chef Herman den Blijker grew up here. The detective novelist Janwillem van de Wetering lived here. By 2018 the borough of Hillegersberg-Schiebroek counted 43,991 residents - a working village that became a wealthy suburb, with a thousand-year-old church on a hill made by a giant.