Well-performing, easy-to-use ocean models are a central ingredient to further the understanding of our Earth and climate. Veros, the versatile ocean simulator, is the first full-blown ocean model entirely written in the high-level programming language Python. It is considerably more approachable than traditional Fortran models and leverages modern best practices; at the same time, thanks to the Bohrium framework, Veros is about half as fast as a reference implementation in Fortran 90.