The Case for Belgium

The Most Underrated Country in Western Europe

Belgium is one of the most consistently overlooked countries in Western Europe — visited primarily as a transit point between France and the Netherlands or as a day trip from Amsterdam or Paris, and almost never given the time it deserves as a destination in its own right. This is an error of the first order. Bruges is the finest preserved medieval city in Northern Europe — better than Bruges's competitors in the Low Countries, more complete than the German Romantische Strasse towns, more genuinely alive than many of the preserved historic districts that have been hollowed out by tourism. Ghent's St. Bavo Cathedral contains the Ghent Altarpiece — the most influential painting in the history of Western art, the work that initiated the Flemish Primitive tradition that changed how Europe painted for 200 years — which alone justifies the journey. Antwerp is the diamond capital of the world and a fashion city of international standing. And Brussels has the Grand Place, which Victor Hugo called the most beautiful square in the world, and the friet culture that produced the French fry and has been refining it ever since.

Belgium is also one of the most compact countries in Europe — Brussels to Bruges by train takes 55 minutes; Brussels to Antwerp takes 45 minutes; Bruges to Ghent takes 25 minutes. The entire itinerary can be covered without a car, using Belgium's excellent intercity rail network.

Days 1–2

Brussels

Brussels is Belgium's capital and the de facto capital of the European Union — a bilingual city (French and Dutch) of 1.2 million people that is simultaneously one of Europe's most international cities and one of its most locally specific. The Grand Place — the central market square surrounded by the 15th-century Town Hall and the guildhalls of the city's medieval merchant corporations, each decorated with gilded allegorical figures — is one of the finest enclosed urban spaces in Europe and the correct first experience of Belgium. Victor Hugo lived in the square for a period of his political exile; his assessment of it as the most beautiful square in the world is defensible.

The Magritte Museum — three floors of a former hotel in the Royale quarter, holding the world's largest collection of René Magritte's work — is the finest art museum in Brussels and one of the most enjoyable in Europe: the chronological organisation of Magritte's career, from his commercial advertising work through the development of his Surrealist iconography to the late works, gives a full picture of a painter whose images have become so ubiquitous that their specific art historical context is easily forgotten. The Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts across the square has a strong collection of Flemish Primitives alongside the Magritte collection for those who want both in a single visit.

The Brussels friet (frite, French fry — the Belgians claim the invention and make a reasonable case for it) is a specific product eaten in a specific way: thick-cut from bintje potatoes, double-fried in beef tallow, served in a paper cone with mayonnaise (not ketchup — mayonnaise) from a frituur (friet shop). Maison Antoine in the Ixelles neighborhood is the most celebrated frituur in Brussels; Fritland on the Rue Henri Maus near the Grand Place is the most central. Eat them standing up, immediately, before they cool.

The Belgian beer culture — 180+ recognized beer styles, 400+ active breweries, the Trappist beer tradition of seven monasteries producing ales that have been copied worldwide and replicated nowhere — deserves at least one dedicated evening in Brussels. The Delirium Café near the Grand Place has 2,000+ beers on its menu, which is both impressive and unnecessary for a first encounter. Better: find a traditional estaminet with twelve taps and learn what a lambic, a gueuze, and a Trappist Westvleteren taste like in sequence.

Days 3–4

Bruges

Bruges is the finest preserved medieval city in Northern Europe and the most complete example of Flemish Gothic architecture available to any traveler. The city's historic center — a UNESCO World Heritage Site of canals, guild houses, Gothic churches, and the 13th-century Belfry tower at its heart — was a trading capital of the Hanseatic League in the medieval period and was preserved by the same accident that preserved Hội An: the silting of the River Zwin in the 15th century diverted trade to Antwerp, leaving Bruges in commercial suspended animation for four centuries while the rest of Flanders industrialized around it.

The Markt — the central market square with the Provincial Court, the Belfry, and the facades of the former guild houses — is the heart of Bruges. The Belfry, a 13th-century tower of 83 meters, is climbable (366 steps, views over the city and the Flemish flatlands) and houses a 47-bell carillon that still performs scheduled concerts. The surrounding canal network — navigable by boat from the Rozenhoedkaai quay, one of the most photographed points in Belgium — gives the city its specific character and its comparison to Venice, which is exaggerated but understandable.

The Groeninge Museum holds the finest collection of Flemish Primitive painting in the world: Jan van Eyck's Madonna with Canon van der Paele (1436), Hugo van der Goes, Hans Memling (who lived and worked in Bruges for the last decade of his life), and Gerard David. These paintings — small-scale, intensely detailed, painted in oil on panel with a technical virtuosity that was then genuinely new — are the origin point of Western realistic painting, and seeing them in the city where most of them were made gives them a specific context that the Louvre and the National Gallery cannot provide. The Memling in Sint-Jan museum, in the former hospital where Memling's altarpieces were commissioned, is equally significant.

Bruges is overrun with day trippers in July and August — take the Bruges-to-Damme canal walk (6 kilometers, 90 minutes) to escape the crowds and see the Flemish countryside that surrounds the city, or visit the Begijnhof (the 13th-century community of lay religious women, now a Benedictine convent, with a courtyard of white-washed houses that is one of the quietest places in Bruges at any time of day) when the Markt is at its most crowded.

Days 5–6

Ghent

Ghent is Belgium's best-kept secret — a university city of 260,000 on the confluence of the Leie and Scheldt rivers, with a medieval center second only to Bruges in completeness and a contemporary cultural and culinary scene that Bruges, more consumed by tourism, cannot match. The specific reason to visit Ghent above all other Belgian cities: the Ghent Altarpiece.

The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb — the polyptych altarpiece completed by Hubert and Jan van Eyck in 1432 for the St. Bavo Cathedral in Ghent — is the most important painting in the history of Western art. This is not hyperbole. It is the work that established oil painting as the dominant medium of European art, that introduced the systematic representation of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface, and that initiated the Flemish Primitive tradition that shaped European painting for two centuries. It was the most stolen artwork in history — looted by Napoleon, sold by a bishop to Prussia, smuggled to Paris before World War I, stolen by the Nazis and hidden in an Austrian salt mine, recovered by the Monuments Men — and is now displayed in the Ghent Altarpiece Visitor Centre in the cathedral itself, after a decade of restoration that revealed colors unseen since the 15th century. See it. Spend an hour in front of it. It will change how you look at paintings.

The Gravensteen — the 12th-century Castle of the Counts, rising improbably from the center of a modern city — is the best-preserved medieval castle in Belgium, with original medieval torture instruments in the upper rooms that are presented with a specifically Flemish dark humor. The Graslei and Korenlei quays — the medieval harbor frontage of Ghent, lined with 12th to 17th-century guild houses of extraordinary variety — are the most beautiful streetscape in Ghent and the correct afternoon walk. The Friday Market (Vrijdagmarkt), where the guilds met and the political assemblies were held for centuries, is still a market square on Fridays and has the best street food in Ghent's center.

Day 7

Antwerp

Antwerp — Belgium's second city and its most cosmopolitan — is the diamond capital of the world (80% of the world's rough diamonds pass through the Jewish diamond district around the Central Station), a fashion city whose Royal Academy of Fine Arts produced the Antwerp Six in the 1980s (Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, and others who collectively shifted global fashion's center of gravity northward), and the city of Rubens — Peter Paul Rubens lived here for the last thirty years of his life and the concentration of his work in the city's churches and the Rubenshuis is unmatched anywhere in the world.

The Rubenshuis — Rubens's house and studio on the Wapper, preserved as he left it at his death in 1640, with a Baroque garden he designed in the Italian manner — is one of the most evocative artist's houses in Europe. The studio where the Descent from the Cross was planned, the Italian-influenced portico in the garden, and the small collection of Rubens's own works displayed in their domestic context produce a different understanding of the painter than the museum versions can. The Cathedral of Our Lady contains four Rubens paintings including the Descent from the Cross and the Elevation of the Cross — the two triptychs that established his international reputation in the early 17th century and that are best seen in the cathedral for which they were made rather than in reproduction.

The MAS (Museum aan de Stroom) — a ten-story tower of stacked boxes on the Antwerp waterfront, with a rooftop panorama over the city and the Scheldt — covers the history of Antwerp as a port city and the global trade networks that made it one of the world's most significant commercial cities in the 16th century. The panoramic view from the rooftop, free to access, is the finest view over Antwerp available at any height.

The Bottom Line

Seven days covering Brussels, Bruges, Ghent, and Antwerp gives you Belgium in full — the capital with the finest square in Northern Europe, the medieval city preserved by commercial accident into the finest example of Flemish Gothic available anywhere, the painting that started Western realism as we know it, and the diamond-and-fashion city of Rubens. Belgium is the country that most rewards travelers who give it serious attention rather than a day trip from Amsterdam. The Ghent Altarpiece alone is worth the journey. Everything else is a bonus that turns out to be extraordinary.