Brussels: what to see, where to stay and how to get around
In August 1695 the army of Louis XIV shelled Brussels for three days to draw his enemies away from a siege elsewhere. Four thousand buildings burned — a third of the city — and the Grand Place was flattened except for its tower. The guilds rebuilt the square in five years, all at once, each paying for its own house, which is why it looks like one building and not twenty. Two hours, and all of it is stone.
A short history of Brussels
According to tradition, in 979 Duke Charles of Lorraine built a fort on an island in the River Senne, and the city grew up around it. In the Middle Ages it grew rich from the cloth trade, and the Grand Place filled with guildhalls. In 1695 the French bombarded it and destroyed most of the buildings on the square, which were rebuilt within a few years. In 1830 the revolution that created Belgium broke out at the city's opera house, and Brussels became its capital. In 1958 the Atomium was built for the world exhibition; since the 1960s the institutions of the European Union have been based here, and since 1967 the NATO headquarters as well.
The ten best sights in Brussels
1Grand PlaceGo at night when it is lit and empty. It is free either way
2Town HallThe one building that survived 1695, and the tower is crooked
3Maison du RoiThe city museum, and Manneken Pis’s 1,000 costumes are inside
4Saint-Gudule CathedralFree, and 300 years in the building of it
5Notre-Dame du SablonFree, and the antique quarter is on its doorstep
6Royal Museums of Fine Arts€15, and the Bruegels alone are worth the hour
7Magritte Museum€15, 230 works, and he lived here his whole life
8Comic Strip Center€15, in a Horta department store, and Tintin is Belgian
9Horta Museum€12, his own house, and no photographs allowed inside
10Musical Instruments Museum€15, headphones play what you look at, and the roof café is free
Scan with your phone camera to open the map there
What is an audio walk?
Tours in Brussels →A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Brussels:
Free walking tours in Brussels
Rebuilt in five years
In August 1695 the army of Louis XIV shelled Brussels for three days to draw his enemies away from a siege elsewhere. Four thousand buildings burned — a third of the city — and the Grand Place was flattened except for its tower. The guilds rebuilt the square in five years, all at once, each paying for its own house, which is why it looks like one building and not twenty. Two hours, and all of it is stone.
- Grand Place · Every house on the square is a guild house, and each one says what it sold: a swan for the butchers, a wheelbarrow for the greasers, a she-wolf for the archers. The guilds were forbidden to rebuild in wood, so they competed in stone and gold leaf instead, and finished in 1700.
- Town Hall · The only thing on the square that survived the shelling, and the tower is not in the middle of the façade — the left wing was built first and the right was added, longer, decades later. The story that the architect jumped from the tower in shame is not true, but Brussels keeps telling it.
- Manneken Pis · Sixty-one centimetres of bronze from 1619, stolen four times and broken once, and the figure on the corner today is a copy — the original is in the museum on the square. He has about a thousand costumes, dressed by a city official, and a schedule says which one he wears.
- Galeries Saint-Hubert · Opened in 1847, the first glass-roofed shopping arcade in Europe, built eleven years before the one in Milan and nine before the first in London. A slum of eleven streets was cleared for it, and the arcade was two hundred metres of iron and glass when both were new materials.
- Saint-Gudule Cathedral · Three hundred years in the building, from 1226 to 1519, and you can read the change in style from the bottom up. The Habsburgs were crowned here, and so were the Belgian kings, but Belgium has no coronation — the king swears an oath in parliament instead.
- Mont des Arts · Leopold II cleared a whole quarter here for a grand approach and then died before it was built, leaving a temporary garden that stood for thirty years. What is here now is from the 1950s, and it is still the only place in Brussels where you see the old town whole.
The style this city invented
Art Nouveau began in Brussels, in one house, in 1893 — Victor Horta’s Hôtel Tassel, the first building anywhere with an open iron structure and a plan organised around light rather than rooms. Within fifteen years the city had hundreds of them. Then it knocked many of them down: Horta’s own masterpiece, the Maison du Peuple, was demolished in 1965, and the word brusselisation entered planning language to mean exactly that. This walk is what is left, and all of it is still lived in. Two and a half hours, uphill in parts.
- Horta Museum · His own house and studio, built 1898, and the only Horta interior you may walk through. The stairwell is the whole idea: a glass roof three floors up, a mirror facing it, and iron thin enough to be drawn rather than built. No photographs are allowed, which is why people remember it.
- Saint-Gilles · The densest Art Nouveau streets in the world are in this commune, because it filled up in exactly the twenty years the style lasted. Nobody lives in a museum here: the houses are flats, the doorbells work, and half of them have been badly restored.
- Avenue Louise · Leopold II wanted a boulevard from the city to the woods, the commune of Ixelles refused to give up the land, and he annexed a two-hundred-metre strip of it to Brussels by royal decree. The avenue is still a thin tongue of Brussels running through another commune on the map.
- Place du Châtelain · A square with no monument and no view, which is why it is full. The Wednesday evening market here is the one Brussels actually goes to — wine by the glass, cheese, and everybody standing in the road until nine.
- Place Flagey · The great brick building shaped like an ocean liner was built in 1938 as the national broadcasting house, and its Studio 4 is one of the best concert acoustics in Europe. The square in front was a car park for forty years and a pond before that; it is a square again since 2008.
- Comic Strip Center · Horta built this as a fabric warehouse in 1906, it stood empty and condemned for twenty years, and the comics saved it. Belgium publishes more comic albums per head than any country on earth, and Tintin, the Smurfs and Lucky Luke were all drawn within a few kilometres of here.
Somebody else’s capital
Brussels is the capital of Belgium, of Flanders, of the French community, of the EU and of NATO, and it is a city where a third of residents were born in another country. The European quarter was built by demolishing a residential one, the Congolese quarter exists because Belgium ruled the Congo, and the Marolles has been resisting the rest of the city for a hundred and fifty years. Two hours, mostly flat, and the honest half of the city.
- Place du Jeu de Balle · A flea market every morning of the year without exception since 1873, including Christmas. It exists because the quarter was poor and the city let it sell what it had; the stalls still arrive at six and the real buying is over by eight.
- Marolles · In 1969 the city planned to clear the quarter for an extension of the Palais de Justice. The residents occupied the streets for weeks and won — the Battle of the Marolles — and the plan was dropped. The old dialect of Brussels, half Flemish and half French, is still spoken here by the oldest.
- Palais de Justice · The largest building put up anywhere in the nineteenth century, bigger in footprint than St Peter’s, and three thousand people were evicted to clear the site. It has been in scaffolding since 1984 — longer than it took to build — and the scaffolding is now itself a listed part of the view.
- Matongé · Named after a district of Kinshasa, and it began in the 1960s when Congolese students came to study in Brussels and stayed. Belgium ruled the Congo for seventy-five years, the first twenty-three of them as Leopold II’s personal property, and this is the one quarter where that history is at street level.
- Cinquantenaire · Leopold II built the arch and the halls for Belgium’s fiftieth anniversary and paid for them out of Congo revenue, which he held personally and never had to account for. The arch was finished in 1905; the Congo was taken from him by the Belgian state in 1908.
- European Parliament · The quarter was the Léopold district, residential and Art Nouveau, and most of it came down in the 1960s and 1990s for offices. The Parliament sits in Brussels but votes in Strasbourg twelve times a year, a convoy of lorries moving the papers — because France will not give up the treaty clause that says so.
Getting to Brussels and getting around
- Brussels Airport · The train to Central is 17 minutes, and runs every 15
- Charleroi Airport · The cheap flights land here, 60km out, and the bus is €20
- Bruxelles-Midi · Eurostar and Thalys. London is 2 hours, Paris is 1:22
- Central Station · Five minutes uphill to the Grand Place
- Gare du Nord · Flixbus and the long-distance coaches leave from here
Cheap eats in Brussels
Eight counters where Brussels eats standing. The chips are the national argument — twice-fried, in beef fat, from a hut — and the waffle you want is the heavy one from Liège, not the light rectangle sold to tourists. Lunch here is under fifteen euros in a city where dinner is sixty.
- Maison Antoine · About €4.50 a cone, and the queue moves
- Fritland · Open until two, and the mitraillette is a meal in a baguette
- Mer du Nord · Croquettes €8, fish of the day €15, cash is faster
- Maison Dandoy · €3 plain, and plain is how it is eaten
- Halles Saint-Géry · A covered hall over the buried river, and entry is free
- Place du Jeu de Balle · Cafés round the flea market, open from six in the morning
- Le Cirio · An 1886 room, and the half-en-half is wine with sparkling
- Marché du Midi · Sunday mornings only, and the cheapest food in the city
Museums in Brussels
- Royal Museums of Fine Arts · €15, closed Mondays, and the Magritte is extra
- Magritte Museum · €15, 230 works, and the queue is worst at eleven
- Comic Strip Center · €15, in a Horta warehouse the comics saved from demolition
- Horta Museum · €12, his own house, and no photographs inside
- Musical Instruments Museum · €15, and the roof café is free and has the view
- AfricaMuseum · €12, tram 44 from Montgomery, 40 minutes out
- MIMA · €12, street art in a brewery, and the canal view
- Train World · €16, and the first railway on the continent was Belgian
Nature and day trips near Brussels
- Forest of Soignes · Free, tram 44 or 8 to the edge
- Bois de la Cambre · Free, a rowing lake, and an island café reached by raft
- Cinquantenaire · Free, and three museums sit under the same arch
- Parc Josaphat · Free, and where the city barbecues on a Sunday
- Parc de Bruxelles · Free, and the palace faces it across the road
- Laeken Park · Free, and the royal greenhouses open three weeks in April
- Botanique · A garden with a concert hall in the old glasshouse
Things to do in Brussels with kids
- Mini-Europe · €18, and the Atomium next door is a combined ticket
- Atomium · €16, escalators inside the tubes, and a view from the top sphere
- Museum of Natural Sciences · €12, and children under six are free
- Comic Strip Center · Tintin, the Smurfs and Lucky Luke, all drawn nearby
- Autoworld · €15, 250 cars under an 1880 glass roof
- Bois de la Cambre · Rowing boats, a playground, and the raft to the island
Live music in Brussels
- Ancienne Belgique · Tickets from €20, and it sells out fast
- Bozar · Horta’s concert hall, 1928, and students pay €10
- La Monnaie · From €15 high up, and the rehearsals are sometimes open
- Botanique · Three halls in an old greenhouse, and new bands
- Fuse · In the Marolles since 1994, techno, and open until seven
- C12 · Under the Central Station, and the sound is the reason
Nightlife in Brussels
Belgium brews about fifteen hundred different beers, and the ones that matter here are the sour ones: lambic, fermented by wild yeast that lives only in the air of this one river valley. Nowhere else can make it, which is why it is the one thing to drink in Brussels.
- Cantillon · €12 with two glasses, and closed Sundays
- A la Mort Subite · A 1928 room that never changed, and the gueuze is the order
- Moeder Lambic · Forty taps, and they will explain every one
- Delirium · 2,000 beers on the list, and it is a tourist room — knowingly
- Rue Dansaert · Where the night starts, and the bars run to Sainte-Catherine
- Matongé · Congolese bars and music, and it goes late
Frequently asked questions about Brussels
What is there to see in Brussels?
The top sights in Brussels are Grand Place, Town Hall and Maison du Roi. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.
How many days do you need in Brussels?
Three to four days are enough to see the best of Brussels without rushing, including at least one walking tour.
Is there a free walking tour in Brussels?
Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Brussels, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: Rebuilt in five years.
How do you get to Brussels and get around?
The main ways are Brussels Airport, Charleroi Airport and Bruxelles-Midi. Full details are in the transport section on this page.
Where to stay in Brussels, and for how much?
sleepntrip shows only rooms in Brussels that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.
Looking for a hotel in Brussels for your dates?
Only rooms that meet nine conditions, up to $80 a night.