Western Europe
Belgium
Three languages, six governments, the best beer in the world and a genuine talent for not explaining itself.
- Capital
- City
- Destination
- Belgium
Belgium is small, divided and quietly excellent at the things that matter daily: bread, beer, chips, painting and comics. The medieval cloth towns of Flanders — Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp — got rich early and kept the buildings. Brussels is the accidental capital of a continent and much better company than its reputation.
Getting around
Everything is within ninety minutes by train and the network is dense and cheap. Flemish cities are flat and cycle well. Brussels is bilingual on every sign, which confuses satnavs more than people.
When to come
Spring and early autumn are best; Bruges in July is a queue. December brings serious Christmas markets and the beer suits the weather.
Worth knowing
- Language boundaries are legally fixed: French in Wallonia, Dutch in Flanders, and Brussels officially both.
- Trappist beer is brewed by monks in six Belgian abbeys and sold to fund them, not for profit.
- Sunday is genuinely closed outside the tourist centres.
At the table
- Chips, twice fried, from a frituur, with a sauce you choose badly the first time
- Trappist and lambic beer — Westvleteren, Orval, gueuze that tastes of cider and horse
- Waterzooi and moules, and chocolate bought where it is made
Travel regions
2 editorial regions, each opening onto its cities.
Popular destinations
The destinations we have written most about, which is not the same as the ones most people go to — and is the only ranking we can honestly compute.
Brussels
Art Nouveau streets, comic-strip walls, a gilded square, and the machinery of a continent in the eastern quarter.
Bruges
A trading city frozen when its river silted up in the 1500s, which is why it looks like this.
Ghent
Bruges's rival, larger, younger and still a working student city rather than a museum of itself.
Antwerp
Rubens's city and the world's diamond exchange, with a fashion school that reset the industry in the 1980s.
Dinant
A citadel on a cliff over the Meuse, a bulbous cathedral below, and the birthplace of the saxophone.
Experiences here
A sample of what is listed across Belgium.
Journeys through Belgium
The Journey Planner holds all 5 of these destinations and the real distances between them. It opens on 6 days, which is the shortest stay this atlas records for each of them added up — change the length, the month, the budget or the pace and build it again.
Fixed points in the year
The record
What we hold about Belgium, where each figure came from, and when it was last checked. The score says what this country is for, not how good it is — it is useful once you are already interested and is not a reason to be.
- Capital
- Brussels
- Currency
- EUR — euro
- Languages
- Dutch, French, German
- Population
- 11,484,055 (2019) — Natural Earth 1:50m admin 0 countries
- ISO codes
- BE · BEL
- Time zone
- CET/CEST (UTC+1/+2)
- Membership
- European Union, Schengen area, Uses the euro, European Economic Area
- Typical day
- €75–165 per person
- Best months
- May, June, July, August, September
- Quieter months
- April, October
- Facts checked
- not verified why this matters
Europe Experience Score
How this is calculated — derived from our own tagging, not from measurement. It says what a place is for, not how good it is. The tick on each bar is the median across the whole Atlas, so a bar short of it is a dimension this place is not for.