315 Best Sights in Belgium

Standing solemnly beside the Bastogne War Museum, this huge star-shape memorial honors the Americans lost in the Battle of the Bulge. The names of all U.S. Army units and the history of the battle are inscribed on the wall, along with a simple phrase in Latin: “The Belgian people remember their American liberators.” Mosaics by Fernand Léger decorate the crypt’s Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish chapels. From the top of the memorial you have a magnificent view of the former battlegrounds. The memorial is open all year.

This handsome three-masted training ship of the Belgian merchant marine, which sailed from the 1930s to the 1960s, is now moored close to the city center, ready to sail if needed. Decks, fittings, and the spartan quarters have been kept intact, and there’s a museum of mementos brought home from the ship’s exotic voyages; during one they hauled back mysterious statues from Easter Island.

Boating, popular along the river and canals, is a fantastic way to see the city and surrounding area. As an alternative to a boat tour, rent your own motorboat from the Minerva Boat Company. Whereas in nearby Bruges everyone except for registered guides are forbidden from boating on its canals, here self-sail boats for four to five people can be hired and no special license is required (although experience is recommended). It's not cheap (from €55 for two hours), but great fun. The embarkation and landing stage is at Coupure, on the corner of Lindenlei.

Just a short stroll from the Atomium lies this kids' favorite, which is essentially a park full of scale models of important European monuments. The 350 monuments range from the Eiffel Tower to a model of Santiago de Compostela Cathedral that was said to have taken 24,000 hours to build. It's a slightly kitsch selfie wonderland.

In the south of Bruges you'll find Minnewater, a pleasant spot of greenery with a large rectangular lake at its center that's dotted with willow trees. So the legend goes: a Saxon warrior returned from fighting to discover his lover dead, so he built a dyke and covered her grave with a lake. Lovers who walk its scenic bridge are said to be blessed. The park lies southeast of the water, and at its far end is Powder Tower, a 12th-century defensive battlement named for the gunpowder it used to store. In summer, the park hosts a number of festivals, most notably the Cactus music festival in July.

Combine a visit here with a stop at the Begijnhof.

To get up to speed on the latest clothing designers, head to MoMu for a fashion crash course. Inside the early-20th-century building you’ll find comprehensive exhibits, some highlighting the avant-garde work of contemporary Flemish designers. Rotating exhibits also make the most of the museum’s collections of clothing, accessories, and textiles dating back to the 18th century; you can ponder the workmanship of delicate antique lace alongside deconstructed blouses from the late 1990s.

This stairway of 374 steps ascends from Hors-Château toward Liège’s Citadelle. It honors the memory of Vincent van Bueren, a leader of the resistance against Charles the Bold. In 1468 he climbed the hill with 600 men, intending to ambush the duke and kill him. Betrayed by their Liègeois accents, they lost their lives and the city was pillaged and burned. Charles the Bold, a superstitious man, made sure the churches remained untouched while the city was in flames so he wouldn’t be sent to hell. At the base of the stairs is a former nunnery, now a compound for antiques dealers.

Oostende's modern art museum contains works by Belgian contemporary artists, from 1880 to the present day, and is well represented by Pierre Alechinsky, Roger Raveel, and Paul van Hoeydonck (whose statuette, The Fallen Astronaut, was deposited on the moon by the Apollo XV crew), among others. Ceramics, paintings, sculpture, and graphic art are all displayed.

Owned by the University of Mons, this is the newest museum to open in the city. Its exhibitions delve into the building's history as a former chapel (complete with visitable crypt) and prison. However, at the time of visiting, it was still a work in progress. English explanations are due to be added in 2022 along with the bulk of the university's collection. A further permanent exhibition on the city's Freemasons will also arrive in 2023. 

For a chronologically and culturally wide-ranging glimpse into the past, the Cinquantenaire Palace building is home to a number of antiquities and ethnographic treasures accumulated over the years. The Egyptian, Grecian, and Byzantine sections are particularly noteworthy and there's a strong focus on home turf, with significant displays on Belgian archaeology and the immense and intricate tapestries for which Brussels was once famous.

From the main square it's a short walk through winding alleys to the Huy's 17th-century Franciscan monastery, a grand building constructed around a central colonnaded cloister. Today it houses the Musée Communal, a mine of local folklore and history from prehistoric to modern times, with an exceptional Art Mosan oak carving of Christ.

This 18th-century mansion was constructed on the site of a former church as a refuge for liberated Christian prisoners. By the 1800s it had fallen into private hands and now holds the city's collection of paintings, sculptures, and furniture.

Nineteenth-century painter and sculptor Constantin Meunier (1831–1905) made his mark capturing the hardships of Belgian workers in a distinctive, realistic style. Examples of his work are displayed in his former house and studio.

Art from the fringes. Set in an old print house, this museum turns its lens on outsider, naive, and folk art in particular, though you'll find more traditional pieces as well among its rotating collection, 

You won’t learn much here unless you speak French, but the addition of a large vivarium to this cramped hall of taxidermied animals (dating back to 1828) makes it a far more entertaining prospect. Very-much-alive spiders, scorpions, tortoises, and lizards can all be seen as part of an international breeding program for rare species. 

The Musée de Cheval et Musée de la Ville D’eaux are two institutions in one. The first hosts a permanent exhibit on Spa’s waters and fountains, and includes a collection of jolites, painted figurines fashioned from local wood. The Horse Museum contains an extensive display of equestrian paraphernalia.

The irony of a museum about the means of payment being free to visit is lost on no one. It also doesn't stop this being one of the surprise joys of the Brussels museum scene. Exhibits unravel different concepts of money throughout history, from Mesopotamian clay tablets to why you need a moko drum to buy a house on the Indonesian island of Alor. 

This somewhat dusty museum contains an extensive selection of American, English, and German war relics, including an authentic code-deciphering enigma machine. Numerous photographs re-create life in the Ardennes during the war.

The charming Laundry Museum is dedicated to the art and science of keeping clothes clean—not a task to be taken lightly, particularly when royalty and nobility come to town to sweat away their maladies.

Between the 15th and 18th centuries, Tournai was famed for its tapestries. This converted neoclassical mansion holds some fine examples of the craft in its small collection, and it is also a workshop where tapestries are made and restored. The only downside is the lack of any explanation in English.  

In an old Franciscan convent, carefully reconstructed interiors give a vivid and varied idea of life in old Wallonia, from coal mines to farm kitchens to the workshops of many different crafts. The museum even includes a court of law, complete with a guillotine. Life-size statues in carnival costumes greet you in the entrance hall. And one gallery is populated by the irreverent marionette Tchantchès and his band, who represent the Liège spirit.

No ruler ever lived in the 16th-century Maison du Roi (House of the King); instead, it housed Charles V’s administrative offices, built on the site of Brussels’s old covered marketplace. Then, in the 19th century, it was given a neo-Gothic makeover—all brooding spires and arches. Today, it houses the City Museum, which boasts some fine tapestries and paintings, notably the Marriage Procession by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. You can also see the "original" (1619 version) Mannekin Pis and an impressive 15th-century weather vane that used to top the town hall.

One of the true gems of the city is also one of the few private museums, its collection assembled across a span of 50 years by a Belgian lawyer, François Duesberg, and his late wife. It focuses on two eras of French design, spanning 1775 to 1825, and delves particularly into the art movement known as "Empire," which grew in the early 19th century. It spawned some incredible objets d'art, which would have been the envy of high society at the time. 

At this writing, the Museum of Fine Arts was in the process of moving from its old location in the Palais des Beaux-Arts and Town Hall to a tailor-made space in the renovated, late-19th-century Defeld Barracks Stables, on boulevard Mayence. It is due to reopen by the end of 2022, though its collection remains the same. Expect to see 19th- and 20th-century art from the surrounding area, with a lot of works depicting the old mining communities of the Hainaut basin. Featured artists include François-Joseph Navez, Paul Delvaux, and a small collection of works by famous Belgian surrealist René Magritte, who grew up on the outskirts of the city, in Chatelet.

The highlights here are the skeletons of some of the 30 iguanodons found in 1878 in the coal mines of Bernissart, which are believed to be about 120 million years old. It also has a fine collection of stones and minerals numbering in the tens of thousands. But the impressive Gallery of Humankind is worth the trip alone and charts the evolution of the human race to the present day.

If you're not lucky enough to be in the city at the time of the Ducasse du Mons (known locally as Doudou), its weeklong, largely drunken medieval festival, then this is the next best thing. The museum lends some cultural context to the battle of St. George and the dragon, which is retold and celebrated across Europe in myriad different ways, and fills in the details around the procession of Ste. Waudru. The building itself is just as interesting, having been built in the 17th century as a kind of pawnbroker-cum-bank, hence its sturdy, rather forbidding exterior.

While its opening hours are somewhere mercurial, it's worth timing a visit right to ride one of the museum's vintage trams, which date from the 1935 World's Fair. Most visits include a 40-minute ride, though on Sunday between April and September, you can do the four-hour tram tour. The journey, accompanied by a commentary on the city, includes a stop for lunch at Schaerbeek's station, where you'll also find the Train Museum. Alternatively, the Tram Museum has around 90 examples of old horse-drawn carriages, trams, and buses from the late 19th century onward to peruse.  

This small museum has exhibits explaining the rich history of both the town and its castle. Your entrance ticket to the castle also covers your entry here.

Considered a scandal in his day, Surrealist artist and Namur native Félicien Rops (1833–98) is now heralded as an artistic treasure. This museum houses a large collection of his drawings, engravings, and prints, which are by turns surreal, erotic, and whimsical. Rops spent time in Paris, mingling with the likes of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé.