The name itself is plain - Veere means ferry, and that is exactly how it began. In 1281 a lord named Wolfert Van Borssele established a ferry crossing and built a ferry house on a dike he had constructed. He called the service the camper-veer, which the English garbled into Campvere over the next four centuries. That same year Wolfert built the castle Sandenburg on one of his dikes, and in November 1282 Count Floris V granted him sovereignty over the land, the castle, the ferry, and the house. The title Lord Van der Veer was born. Veere received formal city rights in 1355. The Admiralty of Veere, set up in 1488 to centralize naval administration for the Burgundian Netherlands, brought the Habsburg fleet here in 1561 and made the port a place of consequence well before the Scots arrived.

The Staple arrangement made Veere unique. From 1541 onward, Scottish merchants trading with continental Europe were required by treaty to ship through this single Dutch port. The Conservator of the Scottish Privileges - a Scottish official with extraordinary diplomatic standing - lived here, supervised disputes, collected fees, and handled relations with the Veere magistrates. A Scottish church, Scottish houses, Scottish weights and measures coexisted with the Dutch town around them. Among the goods passing through were saffron from East Anglian ports like Wells, salt cod from the North Sea, wool from the Borders, hides, and Baltic timber bound for Scottish shipyards. The arrangement survived plague, the Anglo-Dutch wars, and most of three centuries of Continental upheaval, finally ending with the French revolutionary wars in 1799 - a 258-year run that the song The Holland Trade by Scottish musician Brian McNeill still memorializes.

Prosperity drew talent. Flemish architects Antonis Keldermans and Evert Spoorwater designed the Grote Kerk, the town fortifications, the cisterne, and the town hall. Sandenburgh castle, the Van Borssele family seat, became a cultural center where Jan Gossaert van Mabuse - one of the most important Flemish painters of the early sixteenth century - worked as court painter. The poet Adrianus Valerius lived in Veere from 1591, composing the verses that would later be set to the patriotic melodies of his Nederlandtsche Gedenck-clanck. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the city had about 750 houses inside its walls; today it has about 300, a measure of how dramatic the post-1799 decline was when the Scottish trade ended.

The Second World War touched Veere through one of its quieter Dutch corners. At the start of the war, the Royal Netherlands Navy operated a small seaplane base here, with six Fokker C XIV-W aircraft. On 12 May 1940 the base was bombed by Heinkel He 111s; the surviving seaplanes were ordered to evacuate, eventually reaching the Dutch East Indies, where they were destroyed in action against the Japanese in 1941 and 1942. Then, on 7 November 1944, by a coincidence of history that no novelist would have dared, Veere was liberated by Scottish soldiers - troops of the British 52nd (Lowland) Infantry Division, advancing during Operation Infatuate, the Allied assault on Walcheren. The Scottish quarter that had stood empty for nearly 150 years welcomed Scotsmen again, this time in uniform. Unlike most towns on the island, Veere survived the fighting almost undamaged.

In 1961 the Veerse Gat inlet was dammed off as part of the Delta Works, turning the open sea outside the town into the enclosed freshwater lagoon now called the Veerse Meer. The fishing fleet, which had survived the loss of the Staple by working the North Sea, lost its connection to open water and relocated to Colijnsplaat on Noord-Beveland. Tourism replaced fishing as the main business. Around four million visitors a year now come to Walcheren, drawn by the beaches, the marinas, and the unchanged seventeenth-century street plan of the town center. The Schotse Huizen, a pair of merchant houses built in 1539 and 1561 for the Scottish trade, are now a museum. The harbor that once sent Scottish wool to Antwerp now holds yachts.