A long but rewarding day out, these guided trips carry travellers north from Brussels across the Belgian and Dutch countryside to spend several hours in the canal city of Amsterdam. By fast train or coach the Dutch capital lies only a couple of hours away, which makes it just feasible to sample its highlights between breakfast and a late return, a popular option for visitors based in Brussels who do not want to relocate hotels. Amsterdam itself needs little introduction, a city laid out aroun.....

A short train ride north of the capital opens up Antwerp, Belgium second city and one of the great ports of Europe, and these guided day trips package its highlights into a single outing for visitors based in Brussels. Fast trains cover the distance in under an hour, depositing travellers at Antwerp Central Station, a vast and ornate terminus often ranked among the most beautiful railway stations in the world and an attraction in its own right. Antwerp grew rich on trade, and its golden age i.....

Among the largest museums in Belgium, the Art and History Museum occupies one wing of the monumental Cinquantenaire complex, the grand park and triumphal arch laid out in the 1880s to mark fifty years of Belgian independence. Its collections sprawl across millennia and continents, from antiquity to the decorative arts, making it one of the richest and most varied cultural institutions in Brussels. The galleries gather Egyptian mummies and sarcophagi, Greek and Roman sculpture, Near Eastern an.....

Built for the 1958 World Fair as a monument to scientific progress and Belgian engineering, the Atomium is the most recognisable structure in Brussels and a defining image of the optimistic atomic age. Designed by the engineer Andre Waterkeyn with the architects Andre and Jean Polak, it represents the unit cell of an iron crystal magnified some 165 billion times, rendered as nine gleaming spheres linked by tubes. The figures are striking. The structure stands 102 metres tall, each of its nine.....

More than three hundred cars and motorcycles fill Autoworld, a major motoring museum set inside one of the great glass-and-steel halls of the Cinquantenaire park in Brussels. Opened in 1986, it grew out of the private Mahy collection and has become a national institution telling the story of the automobile from its pioneering beginnings to the supercars of the present day. The setting is half the spectacle. The exhibition hall, built for the World Fair of 1888 behind the park triumphal arch, .....

Autrique House was the first building designed by Victor Horta in the Art Nouveau style, completed in 1893 for his friend Eugene Autrique, and it marks the moment when the young architect began to break from convention. Standing on the Chaussee de Haecht in the Schaerbeek district, it is often described as the missing link between traditional bourgeois architecture and the flowing, organic style that Horta and his followers would soon make famous across Brussels. The house already contains th.....

Reproductions of the work of the elusive street artist Banksy fill this Brussels exhibition, which sets out to gather in one place images that are normally scattered across walls in cities around the world. Located on the Rue de Laeken near the city centre, The World of Banksy presents painstaking recreations of the artist most famous stencils and murals, allowing visitors to encounter a body of work that is otherwise hard to see together. Because Banksy real identity remains unknown and his .....

Inside the grand former stock exchange on Boulevard Anspach, Belgian Beer World turns one of the most imposing nineteenth-century buildings in Brussels into an immersive celebration of the country brewing culture. The Bourse, built in 1873 with a richly carved facade, stood empty for years before a major restoration reopened it in 2023 as a public hub crowned by this interactive beer experience. Belgium takes its beer seriously, and the diversity of its styles, from Trappist ales brewed by mo.....

Belgium gave the world Tintin, the Smurfs, Lucky Luke and a host of other comic heroes, and the Belgian Comic Strip Center exists to honour that extraordinary contribution to popular culture. Opened in 1989 in the heart of Brussels, it treats the comic strip as a serious art form, the so-called ninth art, and traces its history through original drawings, manuscripts, models and reconstructions. The museum occupies a building that is itself a masterpiece, the former Magasins Waucquez, a textil.....

The story of Belgium, from its birth as an independent kingdom in 1830 to the present day, is told at the BELvue Museum, set in a handsome former hotel beside the Royal Palace on the Place des Palais. It offers a clear and engaging introduction to a country whose history of monarchy, language divisions, industry, war and European integration can puzzle outsiders. Rather than marching through dates, the museum is arranged around themes such as democracy, prosperity, solidarity, migration and l.....