Information for visitors to Belgium
The Ardennes
There's a popular conception that all of Belgium is pancake-flat - but it isn't true. The southern part of the country holds the forested hills and river valleys of the Ardennes, popular with canoeists and hikers alike.
Belgian Chocolate
Often imitated but never bettered, Belgian chocolate is internationally famous: Leonidas are probably the cheapest chain, but many people prefer the chocolates of the smaller Neuhaus company. Every large town has at least a couple of chocolate shops.
Groeninge Museum
In Bruges, the Groeninge Museum has one of Europe's most magnificent collections of Flemish medieval paintings, from the delicacy of works by Jan van Eyck to the bloodthirsty allegories of Gerard David.
Tournai
Often neglected by British tourists, Tournai's antique town centre, with its narrow lanes and cobbled alleys, fans out from an imposing Romanesque Cathedral, decorated with extraordinary carvings of the Virtues and the Vices.
Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts
In Brussels, the Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts constitute Belgium's most satisfying collection of fine art, with stunning samples of the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Rubens and the Belgian surrealists - most notably Magritte and Delvaux.
Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée
Catch up on Hergé's Adventures of Tintin in Brussels at the Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée, which is devoted to the fascinating history of the country's cartoons and comic strips.
Adoration of the Mystic Lamb
Of the hundreds of exquisite medieval paintings on view in Belgium, perhaps the most wonderful is the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, a stunning and extraordinarily intricate painting displayed in St Baafskathedraal in Ghent.
Onze Lieve Vrouwe Cathedral
If you're heading for Antwerp, you must visit the Onze Lieve Vrouwe Cathedral and admire the three Rubens paintings hanging inside, as well as the fine sixteenth-century interior.
Bruges
The older sections of Bruges fan out from two central squares, Markt and Burg. Markt , edged on three sides by nineteenth-century gabled buildings, is the larger of the two, an impressive open space, on the south side of which the octagonal Belfry (daily 9.30am-5pm; ?2.50) was built in the thirteenth century when the town was at its richest and most extravagant. Inside, the staircase passes the room where the town charters were locked for safekeeping, and an eighteenth-century carillon, before emerging onto the roof. At the foot of the belfry, the rectangular Hallen is a much-restored edifice dating from the thirteenth century, its style and structure modelled on the cloth hall at Ieper (Ypres). From the Markt, Breidelstraat leads through to Burg , whose southern half is fringed by the city's finest group of buildings. One of the best is the Heilig Bloed Basiliek (Basilica of the Holy Blood; April-Sept daily 9.30am-noon & 2-6pm; Oct-March 10am-noon & 2-4pm, closed Wed pm; free), named after a phial of the blood of Christ that dried out soon after it was brought here in 1150 and then miraculously liquefied every Friday at 6pm until 1325. The twelfth-century basilica divides into a shadowy Lower Chapel, built to house a relic of St Basil, and an Upper Chapel where the rock-crystal phial is stored in a grandiose silver tabernacle given by Albert and Isabella of Spain in 1611. The Holy Blood is still venerated here on Fridays at 8am and 3pm, and on Ascension Day (mid-May) it is carried through the town in a colourful but solemn procession, the Helig-Bloedprocessie. In the tiny Treasury (?1) you'll find the jewel-encrusted reliquary that holds the Holy Blood during the procession.
To the left of the basilica, the Stadhuis has a beautiful, turreted sandstone facade, a much-copied exterior that dates from 1376, though its statues of the counts and countesses of Flanders are replacements. Inside, the magnificent Gothic Hall of 1400 (daily 9.30am-5pm; ?3.70) is well worth a look, with vault-keys depicting New Testament scenes and paintings commissioned in 1895 to illustrate the history of the town. The price of admission covers entry to the former alderman's house, the Renaissancezaal Brugse Vrije (daily 9.30am-12.30pm & 1.30-5pm), also on the square, where there's just one exhibit, an enormous marble and oak chimney piece located in the old Magistrates' Hall. A fine example of Renaissance carving, it was completed in 1531 to celebrate the defeat of the French at Pavia in 1525, and is dominated by figures of the Emperor Charles V and his Austrian and Spanish relatives.
Heading south from the Burg, through the archway next to the Stadhuis, it's a brief walk to both the eighteenth-century Vismarkt , and the huddle of picturesque houses that make up Huidenvettersplein . Close by, Dijver follows the canal to the Groeninge Museum at Dijver 12 (April-Sept daily 9.30am-5pm; Oct-March Mon & Wed-Sun 9.30am-5pm; ?6.20, combined ticket with Memling, Arentshuis & Gruuthuse museums ?9.90), which houses a superb sample of Flemish paintings from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries. The best section is of early Flemish work, including several canvases by Jan van Eyck, who lived and worked in Bruges from 1430 until his death eleven years later, and the Judgement of Cambyses by Gerard David. There's also work by Hieronymus Bosch, his Last Judgement a trio of panels crammed with mysterious beasts and scenes of awful cruelty, and the Moreel Triptych by Hans Memling. The museum's selection of seventeenth-century paintings is more modest, though there's a delightfully naturalistic Peasant Lawyer after Pieter Bruegel the Younger.
At Dijver 17 the Gruuthuse Museum (same times as the Groeninge Museum; ?3.20), sited in a rambling fifteenth-century mansion, has a varied collection of fine and applied art, including fine intricately carved altar pieces, musical instruments, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century tapestries and many different types of furniture. Beyond the Gruuthuse, the Onze Lieve Vrouwekerk (daily April-Sept 10am-noon & 2-5pm; Oct-March Mon-Fri 10-noon, Sat 10am-noon & 2-4pm; free) is a massive shambles of different dates and styles, among whose treasures is a delicate marble Madonna and Child by Michelangelo, an influential early work brought from Tuscany by a Flemish merchant. It is also home to the mausoleums (?1.80) of Charles the Bold and his daughter Mary of Burgundy, striking examples of Renaissance carving. The earth beneath the mausoleums has been dug out and mirrors now reveal the frescoes painted on the tomb walls at the start of the sixteenth century.
Opposite the church, the St Jans Hospitaal complex contains a well-preserved fifteenth-century dispensary and the small but important Memling Museum . At the time of writing the museum was closed for rennovation, but the collection of paintings are being held in the Groeninge Museum - ask at the tourist office for details. Born near Frankfurt in 1433, Hans Memling spent most of his working life in Bruges. Of his six paintings on display, the Mystical Marriage of St Catherine, the middle panel of an altarpiece painted between 1475 and 1479, is perhaps the most notable. There's also the unusual Reliquary of St Ursula , a miniature wooden Gothic church painted with the story of St Ursula and the 11,000 martyred virgins. Just north of the St Jans Hospitaal, Heilige Geeststraat heads northwest to the Sint Salvators-kathedraal (St Saviour's Cathedral), a replacement for the cathedral destroyed by the French in the eighteenth century. From here, it's a quick stroll down to the Begijnhof (daily 9am-6pm), a circle of whitewashed houses around a tidy green. Nearby, the picturesque Minnewater was once used as a town harbour, and still has a fifteenth-century lock gate.
Brussels
Visitors to Brussels are often surprised by the raw vitality of the city centre . It's not neat and tidy, and many of the old tenement houses are shabby and bruised, but there's a buzz about the place that's hard to resist and it's here you'll find the majority of the city's sights and attractions, restaurants and bars. The centre is also surprisingly compact, sitting neatly within the rough pentagon of boulevards that enclose it - the petit ring - which follows the course of the fourteenth-century city walls, running from place Rogier in the north round to Porte de Hal in the south. The city centre is itself divided into two main areas. The larger, westerly portion comprises the Lower Town, built for the working and lower-middle classes and fanning out from the Grand-Place, while up on the hill to the east lies the much smaller Upper Town, the traditional home of the Francophile upper classes. Broadly speaking, the boundary between the two zones follows the busy boulevard which swings through the centre under several names - Berlaimont, L'Impératrice and L'Empereur.
The Brussels area telephone code is 02, but note that it has to be dialed even for local calls. From abroad, omit the "0".
The Grand-Place, with its exquisite guildhouses and town hall, is the unquestionable centre of Brussels, a focus for tourists and locals alike. It's surrounded by the Lower Town, whose cramped and populous quarters are bisected by a major north-south boulevard, variously named Adolphe Max, Anspach and Lemonnier. The Lower Town is at its most beguiling to the northwest of the Grand-Place: the area is a cobweb of quaint, narrow lanes and tiny squares, on one of which stands the sturdy church of Ste Catherine, while on another sits the beautiful St Jean Baptiste au Béguinage . By comparison, the streets to the north of the Grand-Place are of less immediate appeal, with dreary rue Neuve, a pedestrianized street of mainstream shops and department stores, leading up to the clumping skyscrapers that surround the place Rogier and the Gare du Nord . This is an uninviting part of the city, but relief is at hand in the precise if bedraggled Habsburg symmetries of the place des Martyrs and at the Belgian Comic Strip Centre, the Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée. To the south of the Grand-Place lie the old working-class streets of the Marolles district and the depressed and predominantly immigrant area in the vicinity of the Gare du Midi .
Quite different in feel from the rest of the city centre, the Upper Town is a self-consciously planned, more monumental quarter, with statuesque buildings lining wide boulevards and squares. Appropriately, it's the home of the Belgian parliament and government departments, formal parks and the Palais Royal . More promisingly, it also accommodates the Cathedral , a fine Gothic edifice with wonderful stained-glass windows, the superb Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts, arguably Belgium's best collection of fine art, and some of the city's swishest shops clustered around the charming place du Grand Sablon. There's also the preposterous bulk of the Palais de Justice, which lords it over the rest of the city, commanding views that on clear days reach way across the suburbs.
Brussels by no means ends with the petit ring. Léopold II pushed the city limits out beyond the course of the old walls, grabbing land from the surrounding communes to create the irregular boundaries that survive today. To the east , he sequestered a rough rectangle of land where he laid out Parc Léopold and across which he ploughed two wide boulevards - Belliard and La Loi. These were designed to provide an imperial approach to the Parc du Cinquantenaire , whose self-glorifying and over-sized monuments were erected to celebrate Belgium's golden jubilee and now house three large if rather turgid museums - the pick is the Musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire. The boulevards were soon colonized by the city's bourgeoisie, but in the last few years they have been displaced by the brash concrete and glass tower blocks of the EU Quarter , among which is the flashy new European Parliament .
South of the city centre is the animated and cosmopolitan district of St Gilles, while neighbouring Ixelles has become the favoured hangout of the arty and the cool, its streets nurturing a handful of designer stores and a growing number of chic bars and restaurants. These two communes also boast much of the best of the city's Art Nouveau architecture. Ixelles is bisected by avenue Louise, a prosperous corridor that's actually considered part of the city centre - and is home to the enjoyable Musée Constantin Meunier .
Further out, to the southwest of the city centre, lies the gritty suburb of Anderlecht , famous for its soccer team and also worth a visit for its Gueuze brewery and the fascinating Erasmus house, one-time residence of Desiderius Erasmus, who lodged here in 1521. Adjacent to this area is Koekelberg, the site of the Basilique du Sacré Coeur, another whopping pile built by Léopold II. Also nearby is the commune of Jette , site of the Musée René Magritte . To the north of the city centre, beyond the tough districts of St Josse and Schaerbeek, is Laeken, city residence of the Belgian royal family, and Heysel , with its notorious soccer stadium and the Atomium, a clumsy leftover from the 1958 World Fair.
In Brussels, the languages of the French- and Flemish-speaking communities have parity. This means that every instance of the written word, from road signs to the yellow pages, has to appear in both languages. Visitors soon adjust, but on arrival this can be very confusing, especially with regard to the names of the city's three main train stations: Bruxelles-Nord (in Flemish it's Brussel-Noord), Bruxelles-Centrale (Brussel-Centraal), and, most bewildering of the lot, Bruxelles-Midi (Brussel-Zuid). Note that for simplicity we've used the French version of street names and sights.
