This small town in the Netherlands is called “Venice of the Netherlands” because it has so many rivers and old houses. The only thing that makes this small town different from Venice is that you won’t find any fuel engines here. Giethoorn doesn’t have any roads, so loud, annoying cars aren’t needed there. It’s just a laid-back neighborhood where people walk and float down the canal when they need to. This Danish town looks like it came from a storybook.
Giethoorn is very quiet. A quacking duck or rustling bird is often the biggest sound you can hear.
The quiet can be put down to the fact that the canals don’t have diesel in them.
All of the boats here run on electricity.
You can float down a side street or a smaller canal to see a local resident strolling around the area.
You will float under a number of small wooden bridges as you look at the old farm houses with their detailed thatched roofs.
In the past, a tiled roof was a sign of wealth because it cost more than a straw roof. Today, it’s just the opposite.
Giethoorn is a town that is beautiful and quiet. You won’t find busy sidewalks or annoying shops here.
Most homes can’t be reached by car because there aren’t enough roads, so the mailman has to use a boat to get to them.
When the canals freeze over in the winter, people use ice skates instead of their dinghies to get around.
Only about 3,000 people live in this town now.
This town looks like it belongs in a fairy tale. It is in the Dutch province of Overijssel, which is in the east of the country.
More than 60 miles of rivers can be explored, making boating the most popular thing to do in Giethoorn.
Giethoorn is a Dutch name that means “goat horns.” On the land where the town is now, the first people to live there found hundreds of goat horns.
In 1230, people fleeing from the Mediterranean found a lot of peat moss in the ground and decided to build a town there.
When peat moss was dug up, it made lakes and ponds with islands in the middle.
Over time, the lakes and ponds turned into canals, and the residents built their homes on these islands.
So, you could only get there by bridge or in a narrow boat called a punter, which was moved by a long pole called a punteraar.
In the 1960s, when Bert Haanstra made his famous comedy Fanfare there, Giethoorn became well-known in the area.
Since then, the town has become a famous place for tourists to visit because it has a lot of cafes and restaurants and places to go boating and biking.
