Every design for Huizen

Huizen simply means houses, a name tradition links to its being the first village in the Gooi with stone houses rather than sod ones. For centuries it farmed, and in winter its farmers went fishing on the Zuiderzee, which slowly turned the place into a thriving fishing village once a harbour was built. When the Zuiderzee was dammed and became a lake, work shifted towards industry and trade. From the sixties onwards new neighbourhoods went up to ease the region's housing shortage, and the village grew fast.

There is a faint memory of the fishing fleet on a weekend morning by the old harbour, where smokehouses once turned herring into bokking for export. It is also one of the larger Dutch towns with no railway station at all. The Huizer museum Het Schoutenhuis keeps the village's past, and the Woensberg is a reminder that Huizen sits at the very end of the Utrechtse Heuvelrug.

The Botterwerf, home of the old wooden fishing boats, is the detail locals point to first, and the one that makes this map unmistakably Huizen.