Coverage / Belgium
Belgium
Western Europe
A compact, densely woven country at the crossroads of Western Europe, Belgium packs the medieval canals and Flemish Primitive art of Bruges and Ghent, the museums and fashion of Antwerp, the chocolate, beer and institutions of Brussels, the World War One remembrance landscape of Flanders Fields around Ypres, and the wooded river valleys of the Ardennes into a territory small enough to cross in a couple of hours by train.
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What you can do in Belgium
Museums & Galleries
- Antwerpyear-roundAntwerp punches far above its size in art and design, and two museums make the case in an afternoon. The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, KMSKA, reopened in 2022 after an eleven-year rebuild and hangs Flemish masters at full force: a fifteen-metre Rubens hall of Baroque altarpieces, works by Van Dyck and Jordaens, and the largest James Ensor collection anywhere, from the grotesque masks to The Oyster Eater. A short walk into the old town, MoMu tells the other half of Antwerp's story, its outsized role in fashion, built around the Antwerp Six who broke out of the Royal Academy in the 1980s and designers like Dries Van Noten and Ann Demeulemeester who followed. One museum shows why Antwerp mattered to painting for four centuries, the other why it still shapes how people dress, and together they explain a city that has always traded on making beautiful things.
- Brugesyear-roundBruges was the home of the Flemish Primitives, the painters who transformed European art with oil paint and microscopic detail in the fifteenth century, and two museums a short walk apart show their work where it was made. The Groeningemuseum holds the city's fine-art collection, including Jan van Eyck's luminous Madonna with Canon van der Paele of 1436 and panels by Hans Memling and Gerard David, then carries the story on through Flemish expressionism to Magritte. A few minutes away, the Old St John's Hospital keeps six paintings Memling made for the hospital itself in the 1480s, among them the tiny, jewel-like Shrine of St Ursula, displayed in the medieval wards where the sick were once cared for. Seeing these works in Bruges, rather than scattered across the world's big galleries, lets you connect the paintings to the streets, guild halls and light of the city that produced them, which is the whole point of coming here.
Witness / Attend
- Carnival of BincheBincheFeb MarThe Carnival of Binche is the most famous carnival in Belgium and one of the oldest surviving street festivals in Europe, staged in this small Hainaut town on the three days before Ash Wednesday. UNESCO listed it in 2003 as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. The whole spectacle builds to Shrove Tuesday, when up to a thousand Gilles, local men dressed in stuffed linen suits painted with lions and crowns, appear at dawn in identical wax masks, dance through the streets to the beat of drums and violas in their wooden clogs, and in the afternoon parade to the Grand-Place tossing blood oranges to the crowd. It is a closed folk ritual rather than a show put on for tourists: you can only become a Gille if you are a man from Binche, the costumes never leave the town, and the oranges may not be bought or resold. Standing in the square as the Gilles advance behind their giant ostrich-plume hats is one of the great living-heritage experiences in Europe.
- Last Post CeremonyYpresyear-roundThe Last Post Ceremony at the Menin Gate is the most moving act of remembrance in Belgium, and it happens every single evening. Since 1928 the buglers of the Last Post Association have closed the road under the great memorial arch in Ypres and sounded the Last Post at eight o'clock, in tribute to the Commonwealth soldiers who fell in the Ypres Salient during the First World War. The Menin Gate itself carries the names of more than 54,000 men who died in the salient and have no known grave, and the town around it, once shelled to rubble, was rebuilt over decades. Standing in the crowd as the traffic stops and the bugles echo under the arch, often alongside school groups laying wreaths, is a quiet, unticketed ritual that has run for nearly a century, broken only by the German occupation of 1940 to 1944, when it continued in England. Ypres makes the whole Flanders Fields landscape, its museum, cemeteries and memorials, legible in one place.
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