Before the tour buses, before the cruise ships dropping passengers at the harbour, the artists came. From the 1880s on, painters discovered a fishing village that seemed to have skipped the nineteenth century entirely - timber houses leaning over narrow lanes, wooden-shoed children on the dike, fishermen in costume because they had nothing else to wear. The locals modeled for cigarettes and coins. The paintings sold across Europe and America, and the village's image hardened into a brand long before anyone had a word for branding. The artists left. The image stayed. By the time mass tourism arrived in the twentieth century, Volendam had a costume tradition older than most of its rivals and a willingness to monetize it that earned the village some sneers and a great deal of money.

Tourists call it the pearl of the Zuiderzee. The sea is gone now - the Afsluitdijk closed it off in 1932, turning saltwater into the freshwater IJsselmeer - but the harbour remains, lined with eel smokers and herring stands and the small flat-bottomed botters that once worked the open Zuiderzee. The Dutch word for smoked eel is paling, and Volendam smokes a lot of it. The smell drifts up the dike. The local sound of Dutch pop music, the wave of warm sentimental ballads that came out of this village from the 1960s onward, took its name from the same source: palingsound, the eel sound. The Cats led in the sixties. BZN took over in the seventies. In 1996, BZN performed a duet with a ten-year-old local named Jan Smit, and Smit has been a national star ever since. Posters of him line shop windows. The village produces singers the way it once produced fishermen.

In the small hours of 1 January 2001, in a café called 't Hemeltje - the Little Heaven - on the top floor of a building near the harbour, a sparkler hit a Christmas decoration hanging from the ceiling. The room held more than 350 young people, most between 13 and 22. The decorations went up in seconds. The temperature reached 400 degrees Celsius. There were bars on the windows. There were not enough exits. Four people died in the building; ten more died in hospital. Two hundred and forty-one were admitted with burns, two hundred of them serious. Almost everyone in Volendam knew someone who was there. The fire rewrote Dutch fire-safety law overnight, and twenty-five years on, the village still gathers on New Year's Day to read the names of the fourteen. The pearl of the Zuiderzee carries grief the tour buses never quite see.

The photo studios cluster along the harbour. You change in a back room, the staff lace and pin you into a Volendammer klerendracht - the village's distinctive women's or men's dress - and a photographer poses you against a painted backdrop of canals and windmills. The result is unmistakably a tourist photo and unmistakably a Volendam tradition. The costume itself is the genuine article: the same white wings and striped pinafores that local women wore daily into the twentieth century, when the village's isolation kept old fashions alive long after the rest of the Netherlands had moved on. A handful of older residents still wear it for occasions; the rest of the village smiles politely and goes home in jeans. The trick of Volendam is that it has neither sold out nor refused to sell - it has simply admitted, with disarming honesty, that the costume is partly performance and partly inheritance, and that the two have always been entangled.

Step off the harbour for half an hour and Volendam quiets immediately. A ferry leaves every thirty to forty-five minutes for Marken, a tiny former island across the water that was a true island until a causeway tied it to the mainland in 1957. Walk the other way and you reach Edam in twenty minutes - the two towns share a municipality and a long, slightly competitive history. Cycle east and you reach the IJsselmeer dike and one of the broadest skies in Europe. The football club, FC Volendam, was promoted to the Eredivisie in 2025 and now plays the country's top tier in a stadium that holds 7,000 - more than enough room for the whole village to come watch, costume optional.