Belgium Discovery Guide

Belgium is small, central and easy, and it rewards a visitor far more than its reputation as a place people pass through suggests. Four cities within an hour of each other by train hold one of the densest concentrations of medieval and Renaissance architecture in Europe.

Bruges is the preserved one, a Hanseatic port whose economy collapsed when its access to the sea silted up, leaving the fifteenth century standing. Ghent is bigger, younger and less museum-like. Antwerp has Rubens, the diamond trade and the best fashion in the country. Brussels has the Grand Place, art nouveau by Horta, and the institutions of the European Union.

The other case is consumable: Belgium takes beer more seriously than anywhere on earth, with Trappist breweries, lambics fermented by wild yeast in the Senne valley, and a brewing culture on the UNESCO list. Add chocolate, chips done properly, and comics treated as a serious art form.

If you have a long weekend

Two nights in Ghent or Bruges and one in Brussels, or the reverse. The train between them takes under an hour, so you can base in one city and see the others as day trips without repacking.

If you came for beer

Visit a Trappist brewery — six of the world’s remaining Trappist breweries are Belgian, and Westvleteren sells only at the abbey gate by appointment. In the Senne valley near Brussels, lambic is fermented by wild airborne yeast and blended into gueuze; Cantillon in Brussels is a working museum. Specialist cafes carry hundreds of beers, each with its own glass.

If you want art

Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece in St Bavo’s, recently restored and startling; Rubens in Antwerp, including his house; Bruegel and the Flemish Primitives in Brussels; and Magritte in a museum devoted to him.

If you want the countryside

The Ardennes in the south — forested hills, castles, caves and river valleys, and the Battle of the Bulge sites around Bastogne. The Westhoek in the far west holds the First World War cemeteries and the Menin Gate at Ypres, where the Last Post has been sounded every evening since 1928.

Belgium is a country that works by not being one thing, and the effort of holding two language communities together shapes nearly every institution.

The language frontier

A line runs east to west across the country: Dutch-speaking Flanders to the north, French-speaking Wallonia to the south, a small German-speaking community in the east, and officially bilingual Brussels in the middle, geographically inside Flanders. Almost every institution is doubled to match — two of everything, from broadcasters to political parties.

Government as an optional extra

Belgium went 541 days without a federal government between 2010 and 2011 and functioned perfectly well, which Belgians cite with a mixture of embarrassment and pride. Regional governments do most of the work.

Self-deprecation

Belgians are unusually ready to mock their own country, its institutions and its surrealism — a word they use about themselves deliberately, with Magritte as the reference. Boastfulness lands badly.

Food as a serious subject

Not a stereotype: Belgium has one of the highest densities of Michelin stars in the world, and the argument about where to get the best chips is conducted with genuine heat.

• Brussels-Capital Region
• Flemish Region
• Walloon Region

Bruges is the pressure point: a city of about twenty thousand in its historic core receiving several million visitors a year, most of them for a single day. Staying a night rather than day-tripping, and walking beyond the Markt and the Burg, changes both the experience and the economics. Ghent, half an hour away, offers much the same architecture with a fraction of the crowds.

Take the train. Belgium has one of the densest rail networks in the world, distances are tiny, and a car is a liability in cities built before them.

Buy chocolate from an actual chocolatier rather than an airport chain, and beer from the brewery or a specialist cafe. Belgium’s small breweries are genuinely small, and the difference in where the money goes is real.

The country is coming to terms with its colonial past in public — the Africa Museum at Tervuren was substantially reworked to address how it had presented the Congo. Visiting it, and reading how it now frames that history, is worth the afternoon.

May, June and September are the best months: mild, longer days, and the cities before or after the summer peak.

July and August are the warmest and busiest, with Bruges and Brussels full. It is also festival season — Tomorrowland in July, the Ghent Festival for ten days, and the Brussels flower carpet laid across the Grand Place in mid-August every second year.

December brings Christmas markets to every city centre and is genuinely lovely, if cold and dark by four in the afternoon.

January to March is grey, damp and cheap. It is also carnival season: Binche on Shrove Tuesday, with its Gilles in wax masks and ostrich plumes throwing oranges, is UNESCO-listed and unlike anything else in Europe.

Rain is possible in any month; Belgians do not regard this as worth discussing.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Relative cost across the country

Belgium is mid-priced for western Europe. Brussels hotels are noticeably cheaper at weekends, when the officials and lobbyists go home.