Brussels & Flanders

Tongeren, a Roman road town, is the oldest in Belgium, and the Frankish lands beyond it produced two medieval states: the County of Flanders, founded under Baldwin Iron-Arm in the 860s, and the Duchy of Brabant, which held Leuven, Brussels and Antwerp. By 1300 Ghent, Bruges and Ypres were among the largest cities north of the Alps, weaving English wool into cloth for all Europe, and their militias beat a French army of knights at the Battle of the Golden Spurs outside Kortrijk on 11 July 1302 — now Flanders' regional holiday.

Under the dukes of Burgundy Bruges was the trading hub of northern Europe; as the Zwin channel silted up, trade moved to Antwerp, the richest port in Europe by the 1560s. The Dutch Revolt then broke the region: Spanish troops retook Antwerp in 1585, the Dutch closed the Scheldt to shipping for two centuries and roughly half the city's people fled north, leaving a Catholic south where Rubens painted for the Counter-Reformation. Brussels, capital of the Spanish and then Austrian Netherlands, had its Grand-Place flattened by a French bombardment in 1695 and rebuilt within five years.

The Belgian revolution began at Brussels's opera house in August 1830, but the new state ran in French, Flanders became its poor rural half and the Flemish Movement spent a century winning Dutch its place in schools, courts and government. The First World War turned the Westhoek into a wasteland — the Yser plain flooded at Nieuwpoort in October 1914, the first mass poison-gas attack at Langemark in April 1915, Passchendaele in 1917 — and in the next war Antwerp's port, taken intact in September 1944, drew more V-2 rockets than any other city. After 1945 Flanders industrialised while Walloon coal declined, and the state reforms of 1970 to 1993 made it a self-governing region, with Brussels — seat of the European institutions since 1958 and of NATO since 1967 — a bilingual region of its own from 1989.

Flanders speaks Dutch, which Flemings call Vlaams in everyday use, in dialects that still shift from district to district: the West Flemish of the coast, hard for other Dutch-speakers to follow, then East Flemish, Brabantian and the Limburgish of the east. Brussels is officially bilingual but mostly French-speaking in practice, and its old Brabantian dialect survives mainly in the Toone puppet theatre and in the zwanze, the city's deadpan humour. Flemish identity is strong and political: the region has its own parliament, flag (a black lion on gold), holiday and broadcasters, and nationalist parties poll high.

The painting tradition runs from Van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece of 1432 and Memling in Bruges through Rubens, Van Dyck and Jordaens in Antwerp to James Ensor in Ostend and Magritte in Brussels, and Antwerp's fashion academy produced the Antwerp Six in the 1980s. Festivals mark the year: the Procession of the Holy Blood through Bruges on Ascension Day, the ten-day Gentse Feesten in July, the Ommegang pageant on the Grand-Place, Ypres' cat-throwing Kattenstoet every third May, and the Tour of Flanders in early April on the cobbled climbs of the Flemish Ardennes. The belfries and the thirteen beguinages of Flanders are UNESCO-listed, and Mechelen trains the world's carillonneurs.

Catholicism shaped the townscape — every town has its beguinage, abbey and procession — but practice is now low, and Brussels has one of the largest Muslim populations of any European capital. Manners are reserved and punctual; Flemings are direct, dislike showiness and consider it polite, in Brussels, to ask which language someone prefers before launching in. Rivalries are local and cheerful: Antwerp calls itself 't Stad, "the city", Bruges and Ghent trade insults about tourists, and the football derbies between Club Brugge, Anderlecht and Antwerp fill Sunday evenings.

Flanders has about 6.8 million people and the Brussels-Capital Region another 1.25 million in its nineteen communes, together roughly two-thirds of Belgium in less than half its area — one of the most densely built landscapes in Europe, where ribbon development runs one town into the next. Antwerp, with about 540,000 people, is the largest municipality in the country; Ghent has around 270,000, Bruges 120,000, Leuven 100,000, and Mechelen, Aalst, Hasselt and Kortrijk between 75,000 and 90,000.

The economy is the strongest in Belgium. The merged port of Antwerp-Bruges is Europe's second-largest after Rotterdam and holds the continent's biggest chemical cluster; Antwerp's diamond district handles most of the world's rough stones; Ghent's canal-side plants build Volvo cars and roll steel; and Leuven pairs the university founded in 1425 with the imec chip laboratory and the headquarters of AB InBev, the world's largest brewer. Brussels lives off the European institutions, NATO, lobbying, law and finance, fed by commuter trains from both regions. Limburg's last coal mine closed in 1992 and Genk lost its Ford plant in 2014; fruit orchards around Sint-Truiden, vegetable auctions at Mechelen and Roeselare and textiles around Kortrijk keep the countryside at work.

Days start early — schools at half past eight, offices soon after — with a sandwich lunch and dinner around six or seven; the Friday-evening trip to the frituur is a ritual, most shops shut on Sundays, and bicycles carry a real share of trips in the flat towns. The pressing issues are Brussels' housing costs and traffic, among the worst in Europe; Bruges' effort to limit day-trippers and coach parties; a nitrogen-pollution ruling that has squeezed farmers; and the cocaine trade through Antwerp's port, which has brought gang violence to its suburbs.

Flemish cooking is the northern, butter-and-beer half of Belgian food. Stoofvlees or stoverij, beef stewed in brown beer with mustard-smeared bread, is the dish that comes with frieten from the frituur; Ghent's waterzooi is a creamy stew of chicken or fish; paling in 't groen is eel from the Scheldt in a sauce of green herbs; witloof (chicory), first forced in the cellars around Brussels, is wrapped in ham and baked in cheese sauce; and konijn met pruimen, rabbit with prunes, and stoemp, mashed potato and vegetables, are Sunday food. The coast adds Ostend's grey shrimps, peeled by hand and packed into garnaalkroketten or stuffed into a tomato, mussels in season and sole from the Vistrap fish market.

Sweets are regional: speculoos biscuits from Hasselt, the light Brussels waffle, the mattentaart of Geraardsbergen, Limburg's fruit vlaai, the cone-shaped cuberdon sweets of Ghent, Antwerp's handjes biscuits and Brussels pralines, invented by Neuhaus in the Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert in 1912.

Beer is the region's pride. Westvleteren, brewed by the monks of Sint-Sixtus near Poperinge, and Westmalle, north of Antwerp, are Trappist; the Pajottenland west of Brussels and Cantillon in Anderlecht make lambic, spontaneously fermented and blended into sour gueuze or cherry kriek; Roeselare's Rodenbach and Oudenaarde's Liefmans make the vinegary red-brown ales of West and East Flanders; and Leuven's Stella Artois, Duvel from Breendonk, Hoegaarden's cloudy white beer and Antwerp's De Koninck bolleke fill the cafés. Hasselt distils jenever, the ancestor of gin, and a coffee with a biscuit is the standard mid-morning stop.

Brussels centres on the Grand-Place, its gilded guildhalls ringing the Gothic town hall, with Manneken-Pis, the Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert and the comic-strip murals a few streets away. Beyond the old core are Victor Horta's Art Nouveau houses in Saint-Gilles and Ixelles, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts and the Magritte Museum on the Mont des Arts, the European quarter around the Berlaymont, the Atomium from Expo 58 and the royal greenhouses at Laeken, opened for three weeks each spring.

Bruges keeps a walled medieval core of canals, the Markt beneath its 83-metre belfry, the Burg with the Basilica of the Holy Blood, the Beguinage and Memling's panels in the old St John's Hospital. Ghent has the Gravensteen castle, Van Eyck's altarpiece in St Bavo's Cathedral and the guildhouses of the Graslei and Korenlei; Antwerp has Rubens's altarpieces in the Cathedral of Our Lady, the Plantin-Moretus printing house, the Rubens House, the MAS museum above the old docks and the diamond quarter beside Central Station. Leuven offers a lace-like Gothic town hall, the Grand Beguinage and the Oude Markt; Mechelen, between the two, has St Rumbold's 97-metre tower and the Kazerne Dossin Holocaust museum in the wartime deportation barracks.

The 67-kilometre North Sea coast runs from De Panne's dunes to the Zwin nature reserve at Knokke-Heist, linked end to end by the Kusttram, with Ensor's house in Ostend and the Belle Époque villas of De Haan. Inland, the Flanders Fields memorials cluster around Ypres: the rebuilt Cloth Hall with the In Flanders Fields Museum, the Menin Gate, where buglers have sounded the Last Post at eight every evening since 1928, Tyne Cot at Passchendaele, the largest Commonwealth war cemetery, and Talbot House in Poperinge. Elsewhere are the Bokrijk open-air museum and the heaths of the Hoge Kempen National Park in Limburg, the blossoming orchards of Haspengouw and the cobbled climbs of the Flemish Ardennes around Oudenaarde and Geraardsbergen.