Antwerp

A folk tale derives the city's name from handwerpen, "hand-throwing": the hero Silvius Brabo is said to have cut off the hand of the giant Antigoon, who maimed boatmen who would not pay his toll, and flung it into the Scheldt. Het Steen, the riverside fortress, has its origins in the ninth century. When the Zwin silted up and Bruges declined, trade moved to Antwerp.

Between 1500 and 1569 the population doubled. The Portuguese made Antwerp one of their main bases for Asian spices by 1504, sugar from Atlantic plantations, increasingly worked by enslaved Africans, made it Europe's sugar capital, and its exchange of 1531 was the world's first purpose-built commodity bourse. At the beginning of the century the city handled about 40 per cent of world trade, and by 1560 it had around 360 painters, Pieter Bruegel among them. Then the Dutch Revolt broke this world apart. On 4 November 1576 Spanish troops sacked the city in the Spanish Fury, killing about 8,000 people; in 1585 the Duke of Parma took it after a long siege and Protestants were given two years to leave; and in 1648 the Treaty of Münster closed the Scheldt to shipping.

By 1800 the population had fallen below 40,000, when Napoleon funded new docks to rival London. Antwerp hosted the 1920 Summer Olympics. Occupied in 1940 and liberated on 4 September 1944, it was then hit by more V-2 rockets than all other targets combined. A ten-year plan from 1956 expanded the port, the surrounding municipalities were merged into the city in 1983, and from the 1990s Antwerp rebranded itself as a fashion centre.

Antwerp's golden age left an outstanding artistic legacy. In the 17th century its school of painting included Rubens, Van Dyck and Jordaens; Rubens bought his town house in 1610 and rebuilt it to his own designs like an Italian palazzo, and his paintings hang in the city's churches. The Plantin-Moretus house preserves the workshop of a 16th-century printing dynasty. Fashion is the modern equivalent: the Antwerp Six, who trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1980–81, made the city's name when they took their designs to London in 1986, and MoMu, the fashion museum, shares a building with the academy's fashion department.

The city is very diverse, with about 180 nationalities; in 2019 more than half the population had a parent who was not born a Belgian citizen. About 15,000 Haredi Jews, many of them Hasidic, live here, making Antwerp one of only two European cities, with London, to have a large Haredi community, and Jain families from India are prominent in the diamond trade alongside Jewish, Lebanese and Armenian dealers.

People from Antwerp are nicknamed Sinjoren, from the Spanish señor, after the Spanish nobles who ruled in the 17th century, and some of them call the city simply 't Stad. Music runs from the Antwerp Jazz Club, founded in 1938 and on the Grote Markt since 1994, to the opera and the symphony orchestra, with big concerts at the Sportpaleis. Tomorrowland, the dance music festival, is held at Boom, about 15 km south of the city.

More than 556,000 people lived in the municipality in 2025, making it the most populous in Belgium, and the metropolitan area holds over 1.2 million. The city is divided into districts, among them Berchem, Borgerhout, Deurne, Hoboken, Merksem and Wilrijk, merged into Antwerp in 1983, and Borsbeek, which joined in January 2025. Since February 2025 the acting mayor has been Els van Doesburg of the N-VA, leading a coalition with Vooruit.

The port, second in Europe after Rotterdam and within the world's top 20, is the base of the economy. The diamond district beside Central Station is the other mainstay: about 85 per cent of the world's rough diamonds pass through it each year, though much of the cutting and polishing has moved to cheaper places such as India and Dubai. The Meir is the country's busiest shopping street, with the highest rents in Belgium.

Neighbourhoods vary widely, from the Art Nouveau streets of Zurenborg and the galleries of the Zuid to the busy multicultural streets of Borgerhout and the Orthodox Jewish quarter near the station. A large new green neighbourhood, Nieuw Zuid, is being built on old railway land beside the river.

Antwerp's best-known local treat is the Antwerpse handje, a biscuit or chocolate in the shape of a hand; the almond biscuit version was created in 1934. The city's drink is the bolleke, formerly called De Koninck, an amber Spéciale belge of 5.2 per cent on the market since 1913. Elixir d'Anvers, a herbal liqueur made by the De Beukelaer distillery since 1863, is the local digestif.

Belgian frites are sold all over the centre, and the Flemish classics — carbonade flamande, beef stewed in beer and mustard and often served with fries, and moules-frites, mussels cooked with onions and celery — fill the menus of the old town. The variety comes from the city's communities: a small Chinatown north of Central Station, entered between two stone lions on Van Wesenbekestraat, and the many communities that make Antwerp home to about 180 nationalities.

Markets are part of the weekend. The Vogelenmarkt fills the Oudevaartplaats on Sunday mornings, with stalls spreading onto the Theaterplein on Saturdays and Sundays, and an antiques market is held every Sunday on the Sint-Jansvliet.