The Vecht has been a north-south corridor since Roman times, but the marsh around it stayed wilderness until peat cutters drained it in the centuries after 1000 AD. Weesp received its city rights in 1355 and celebrated the 650th anniversary in 2005, although the settlement was older than that. From the late Middle Ages onward, the Vecht was the eastern defensive line for the County of Holland, and Weesp sat on it the way a button sits on a coat. The defense doctrine was peculiarly Dutch: open the dikes, flood the polders, let the water do the fighting. The Stelling van Amsterdam, the great circular Defense Line of Amsterdam, eventually swallowed Weesp into a ring of forty-two forts and inundation zones around the capital, a system so distinctive that UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List.

The historic center is the size of a pocket. The Sint-Laurentiuskerk anchors one square; the seventeenth-century stadhuis with its gabled facade anchors another. Canals thread between them, lined with the brick houses of a town that was once richer than it looked. There are three working windmills, all visible from the streets. 't Haantje, The Rooster, stands on the bank of the Smal Weesp west of the center. Eendragt, Unity, and Vriendschap, Friendship, sit close together on the Vecht to the southeast. Vriendschap still grinds wheat flour every Saturday, and visitors can climb inside. As for the Weesper moppen, you buy them at Cor Muhl on Nieuwstad, Wesselman on Breedstraat, or Hans Klercq on Slijkstraat, and you eat them with coffee, slowly, the way the town does most things.

Walk south of the center across the Aetsveldsche Polder and you reach Fort Hinderdam on an island in the Vecht, built around 1848 and never accessible. Fort Nigtevecht, built in 1904, sits along the Amsterdam-Rhine Canal two kilometers south, also closed. Bunker clusters from the 1930s lie hidden in the trees near Uitermeer, around the Hakkelaarsbrug, and in the woods at Muiderberg, the last gasps of a defense doctrine that the German army of May 1940 made irrelevant in five days. The 187-kilometer Forten Route runs past all forty-two forts of the Stelling, and starts within a few blocks of Weesp station. Cyclists can also follow the Plassen Route through the lakes, the Boerenland Route through the farmland, or strike out for Muiden, eight kilometers north, where the medieval Muiderslot castle guards the IJmeer.

On 24 March 2022, Weesp ceased to be an independent municipality. After centuries of stubborn small-town autonomy, the town of some 20,000 people voted in a non-binding referendum to merge with its giant neighbor, and the Dutch parliament agreed. Weesp is now formally part of the municipality of Amsterdam, a curiosity of governance: the nearest small town to the capital, three kilometers from the end of the Amsterdam metro, but separated by the Amsterdam-Rhine Canal in a way that keeps the two places visually distinct. Posters protesting a proposed A6-A9 motorway through the surrounding fields still appear in shop windows. The town has not stopped having opinions just because it lost its mayor.

Weesp is a railway junction where the Gooilijn from Amersfoort meets the Flevolijn from Almere and Lelystad, and both feed into the line to Amsterdam Centraal. Four trains an hour run to Amsterdam, twelve minutes; trains to Utrecht via Hilversum run every half hour, thirty-eight minutes. From Schiphol Airport, twenty-five minutes via Amsterdam-Zuid. The fortified town of Naarden, with its seventeenth-century star-shaped bastions, is the next stop, seven minutes away. Cyclists rent bikes at the station and reach Naarden through the Naardermeer nature reserve in an hour. Weesp earns its keep as a stopover, but the town itself, with its almond cakes, its three windmills, and its ridiculously over-engineered defenses, is the reason to stop.