Belgium
Brussels
Europe's most ornate square, hidden in a scruffy working capital that also does the continent's best beer, chocolate and fries.
Brussels is the capital of Belgium and, in practice, of the European Union: a bilingual, unglamorous, genuinely lived-in city that keeps its best things slightly out of sight. The Grand-Place, a square of gilded guild houses that Victor Hugo called the most beautiful in the world, sits hidden behind a warren of lanes; Art Nouveau townhouses stand on ordinary residential streets; comic-strip murals turn up on gable ends. Add the Atomium out at the old world's-fair grounds, plus beer, chocolate, fries and mussels done seriously, and a plain-looking city turns out to be one of Europe's great eaters.
Suggested stay
2–4 days
Language
Dutch, French
Currency
EUR
Timezone
UTC+2
Why you'll love Brussels
The Grand-Place a hemmed-in square of gilded baroque guild houses rebuilt after a French bombardment, so sudden when you step out of the entrance lanes that people stop dead
Beer the deepest brewing tradition anywhere sits on the doorstep, from trappist ales to the sour, wild-fermented lambics and gueuzes made nowhere on earth but this valley
Art Nouveau Victor Horta invented the style here in the 1890s, and his houses still stand on ordinary residential streets in Saint-Gilles and Ixelles rather than penned into a museum quarter
Eating fries from a hut, mussels in a black pot, two rival schools of waffle and chocolate windows on every second corner, taken seriously in a way no other capital manages
Best time to visit
Apr-Oct
15-23° days
50.847° N, 4.353° E
UTC+2 · Europe/Brussels
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Weather & when to go to Brussels
Month by month: typical highs and lows, rainfall and rain days.
✓ Best Apr-Oct
Cards tinted by calculated verdict · big number = typical daily high, small = low · hover for conditions
When to avoid Brussels
January and December are the flat stretch: dark by mid-afternoon, damp, grey and cold, with the centre answering in lights rather than daylight. The other catch is that this is a working city, not a resort - in August a lot of locals leave and plenty of the small kitchens simply close for the month.
Top things to do in Brussels
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Grand-Place - guild houses around a Gothic town hall
history culture arts scenic 👍 PopularA closed square of gilded baroque facades, each one a trade guild's headquarters rebuilt after the French bombardment of 1695, around a Gothic town hall whose off-centre spire is the city's oldest joke. Come twice: once in daylight for the gold leaf, once late when the crowds thin and the buildings are lit.
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Magritte Museum - the largest collection of his work anywhere
culture arts 👍 PopularSeveral floors of the Royal Museums given over to the bowler hats, pipes and impossible skies of Belgium's great surrealist, hung chronologically from his commercial-art years onward. The same ticket opens the Old Masters wing next door, where Bruegel and Rubens hang, so allow more time than the name suggests.
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Atomium - Expo 58's iron crystal at building scale
history scenic 👍 PopularNine steel spheres held on tubes, built for the 1958 world's fair as an iron crystal magnified to the size of a building, and never taken down afterwards. The tubes carry escalators and stairs, the top sphere holds a viewing deck over the Heysel plateau, and Mini-Europe sits at its feet for anyone travelling with children.
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Horta Museum - Art Nouveau inside the architect's own house
culture arts history ⭐ Highly recommendedVictor Horta built and lived in this pair of narrow Saint-Gilles townhouses, and they are the clearest lesson anywhere in what he invented: a stairwell lit from a glass roof, iron worked like plant stems, and every handle, hinge and mosaic designed to match. Small, strictly no photographs, and worth the queue.
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Cantillon Brewery - lambic and gueuze in a working museum
food nightlife music ⭐ Highly recommendedThe last traditional lambic brewery left inside Brussels, run as a museum you walk round unguided while the work goes on around you: an open copper vat in the roof where wild yeasts from the Senne valley settle on the cooling wort, then barrels, then years of waiting. Sour, dry and nothing like other beer.
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Musical Instruments Museum - the Old England building on Mont des Arts
culture arts scenicAn Art Nouveau department store of black iron and glass, now packed with several thousand instruments and handed out with headphones that play each one as you lean towards it. The rooftop cafe has the best view in the city, straight down over the Mont des Arts to the spire of the town hall.
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Belgian Comic Strip Center - Tintin, the Smurfs and the ninth art
culture arts historyBelgium takes comics as seriously as any country on earth, and the collection sits in a Horta-designed textile warehouse rescued from demolition. Tintin, Lucky Luke, the Smurfs and Spirou all started here. Follow it with the comic-strip mural trail, dozens of painted gable ends scattered through the centre.
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Place du Jeu de Balle - the Marolles flea market
shopping off beaten pathA junk market that runs on the square every single morning of the year, harder and cheaper than the antique dealers up the hill in the Sablon, and the best window onto the old working-class Marolles around it. Get there early; by lunchtime it is packing up and the cafes on the edge fill instead.
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Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert - Europe's first shopping arcade
shopping historyA glass-vaulted arcade of 1847, older than the galleries of Milan and Paris, cutting through the block beside the Grand-Place in three named sections. Chocolatiers, a cinema, a puppet theatre and cafes under the glass, and the shortest dry route across the old town in Brussels rain.
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Parc du Cinquantenaire - triumphal arch, Autoworld and the army museum
history scenicLeopold II's fiftieth-anniversary arch closes a formal park on the edge of the European Quarter, with museums built into its wings: vintage cars, an enormous and eccentric military collection, and art and history. You can usually get out onto the top of the arch itself for a view down the axis.
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Fries, waffles and moules - eating the national dishes properly
foodFries come from a friterie hut, twice-fried, in a paper cone under a sauce chosen from a long list, and never as a side to a meal. Waffles split into two schools: the light rectangular Brussels and the dense sugared Liege. Mussels arrive in a black pot with a second empty one for the shells.
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Manneken Pis - the small bronze joke at the centre of town
history culture artsEverybody warns you how small he is and everybody goes anyway: a knee-high seventeenth-century fountain boy on a corner three streets off the Grand-Place. The point is the wardrobe, hundreds of costumes donated over the centuries, changed on him through the week and displayed at the Garderobe museum nearby.
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Royal Greenhouses of Laeken - iron and glass, open a few weeks a year
nature wildlife historyLeopold II's domed conservatories in the grounds of the royal palace at Laeken are a nineteenth-century glass city of palms, camellias and geraniums. They open to the public only for a short run in spring, while the planting is in flower, and are shut and invisible the rest of the year.
Best areas to stay in Brussels
$ Budget $$ Mid-range $$$ Premium
Grand-Place and the Ilot Sacre
First-time visitors $$Gilded square, tight lanes, tourist crush
Explore hotels in Grand-Place and the Ilot Sacre →
Sainte-Catherine and Dansaert
Food and drink $$Old fish market, indie shops, good bars
Explore hotels in Sainte-Catherine and Dansaert →
Sablon
Couples $$$Antiques, chocolatiers and upper-town calm
Explore hotels in Sablon →
Ixelles (Chatelain and Flagey)
Repeat visitors $$Leafy, arty, thick with restaurants
Explore hotels in Ixelles (Chatelain and Flagey) →
Saint-Gilles
Value seekers $Art Nouveau streets with a bohemian edge
Explore hotels in Saint-Gilles →
Live nightly prices from Booking.com, Agoda and others, centred on Brussels
Getting to & around Brussels
Getting there
Fly into Brussels Airport at Zaventem, then about twenty minutes by train to Brussels-Central
Flight
Brussels Airport (BRU)
Brussels Airport sits about 12 km northeast at Zaventem, with the railway station directly under the terminal. Trains run several times an hour to Brussels-Nord, Central and Midi and take fifteen to twenty-five minutes. Buses and taxis also run, but the train beats both at almost any hour.
Train
Brussels-Midi / Zuid
The international station: Eurostar from London, Paris, Amsterdam and Cologne, all arriving a few minutes by metro or local train from the centre
Train
Brussels-Central and Brussels-Nord
Domestic intercity trains put almost every Belgian city within about an hour and a half, and Central puts you a two-minute walk below the Grand-Place
Flight
Brussels South Charleroi
The low-cost airport lies well south of the city and is not really Brussels; a scheduled shuttle coach runs to Brussels-Midi in around an hour
Coach
Brussels-Nord
Long-distance coaches from across Europe use the bus station beside Gare du Nord, a few metro stops from the old town
Drive
The R0 ring feeds motorways in every direction, but a low-emission zone covers the whole region and the centre is largely pedestrianised; park on the edge and take a tram
Getting around
Metro
STIB lines cross the city quickly and are the fastest way out to Cinquantenaire, the European Quarter or Heysel
TBC
Tram
The most useful mode: a dense network that dives into premetro tunnels under the centre and surfaces in Ixelles and Saint-Gilles
TBC
Walking
The old town is compact, but remember the city is built on a hill and the Upper Town is a real climb from the Grand-Place
Free
Train
The north-south tunnel links Midi, Central and Nord in minutes and is the quickest hop between them with luggage
TBC
Bus
Fills in the outer communes and the hills; night buses cover the weekend hours after the trams stop
TBC
Bike
Villo share stands and dockless bikes are everywhere, though the hills and the traffic make Brussels harder riding than Flanders
TBC
Taxi
Metered taxis and ride-hailing both work and are most useful late, once trams and metro have wound down
TBC
Day trips from Brussels
Bruges
Full dayMedieval canal city
The best-preserved medieval town in northern Europe, and the busiest place in Belgium: canals, the brick belfry over the Markt, and Memling and van Eyck panels in the old hospital and the Groeningemuseum. Stay past the last coach and the lanes empty out almost completely.
Getting there
train
About 1 hr by train from Brussels-Midi or Central
Ghent
Full dayGuild houses and a castle
Bruges without the queue and with a university inside it: a moated stone castle in the middle of town, a row of guild houses along the Graslei, and the van Eycks' Ghent Altarpiece in the cathedral, restored panel by panel. Better nightlife than Bruges by a distance.
Getting there
train
About 30 min by train
Antwerp
Full dayRubens, diamonds and fashion
Belgium's second city and its most stylish, built on the Scheldt and on diamonds. Rubens' own house and his altarpieces in the cathedral, the fashion legacy of the Antwerp Six around Nationalestraat, and a railway station so ornate that it is the reason some people come.
Getting there
train
About 45 min by train
Leuven
Half dayUniversity town and beer
A compact Flemish university city with a town hall so encrusted with carved figures that it looks like lace, the oldest Catholic university in the world around it, and a vast student square lined end to end with bars. Big brewing here, and far better small breweries nearby.
Getting there
train
About 25 min by train
Waterloo battlefield
Half day1815 battlefield
The fields where Napoleon lost for the last time are still farmland, read from the top of a conical earth mound crowned by a cast-iron lion. An underground museum and a painted panorama rotunda sit beneath it, and the walled farmhouses that anchored the line still stand.
Getting there
train | bus
About 1 hr by train to Braine-l'Alleud then a local bus
Dinant and the Meuse valley
Full dayRiver cliffs and citadel
A single street of houses squeezed between a limestone cliff and the Meuse, under a bulbous cathedral spire and a citadel reached by cable car or a great many steps. Adolphe Sax was born here, so saxophones turn up everywhere. Namur, on the way out, is worth the stop.
Getting there
train
About 1 hr 30 min by train, changing at Namur
A little history of Brussels
Brussels began as a fortified settlement on an island in the marshy Senne, at a crossing on the trade road between Cologne and Bruges; the traditional founding date is 979. Under the dukes of Brabant and then the Burgundians and Habsburgs it grew into a court city, wealthy on cloth and tapestry, and Charles V ruled half of Europe from the Coudenberg palace on the hill above it. In 1695 a French army bombarded the town for three days and burned out the centre; the guilds rebuilt the Grand-Place within about five years, which is why a medieval square looks uniformly baroque.
Belgium was born here in 1830, after a riot that started at the opera house on Place de la Monnaie. The nineteenth-century city vaulted over its filthy river, cut grand boulevards above it, and grew rich enough on Congo rubber, taken under Leopold II's brutal private rule, to pay for the arches, parks and glasshouses the city still wears. Expo 58 left the Atomium, and the arrival of the European institutions and NATO in the following decade turned Brussels into an administrative capital, clearing whole quarters for offices in a process Belgians named Brusselisation.
A fortress on an island in the Senne marks the traditional founding of the town
Work begins on the Gothic town hall that still fronts the Grand-Place
A French bombardment burns out the centre; the guilds rebuild the square in baroque stone
Revolution breaks out at the Monnaie opera house and Belgium becomes independent
The Senne is vaulted over and the central boulevards are cut above it
Victor Horta finishes the Hotel Tassel, the first Art Nouveau townhouse
Expo 58 opens on the Heysel plateau and leaves the Atomium behind
NATO moves its headquarters from Paris to Brussels, deepening the city's institutional role
The Brussels-Capital Region is created as Belgium reorganises itself as a federal state
Know before you go
Payment
Cards everywhere
English
Widely spoken
Wifi
Reliable
Power
Type C / E
230 V, 50 Hz
Dialing
+32
The months our climate read flags to avoid: the wettest, lowest-rated weather of the year.
Mobile network & SIM card
Get an eSIM before you fly
A Belgium eSIM installs in minutes and works the moment you switch off flight mode. No SIM swap, no roaming bill.
FAQs about Brussels
▸ When is the best time to visit Brussels?
April to October is the reliable stretch, with May, June and September the sweet spot: long light, terraces out, and the parks and Art Nouveau streets at their best. July and August are warm, though a lot of locals are away. December and January are dark, damp and grey, and best spent indoors.
▸ How many days do you need in Brussels?
Two full days covers the Grand-Place, a couple of museums, the Marolles and a proper evening of beer and eating. A third and fourth turn Brussels into a base, since Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp and Leuven all sit within about an hour by train from the centre.
▸ Is Brussels worth it, or should I just go to Bruges?
Bruges is prettier for an afternoon; Brussels is a real city and rewards the longer stay. Come for Art Nouveau, surrealism, comics, the flea market and the best beer culture in the world, and treat Bruges as a day trip from here rather than the other way round.
▸ Is Brussels expensive?
Cheaper than Paris, London or Amsterdam, and noticeably better value at the table, where a beer and a plate of mussels or fries buys more than the equivalent in those cities. Hotel rooms often ease at weekends when the institutional and business crowd goes home, which is worth planning around.
▸ Do people speak French or Dutch in Brussels?
Officially both, which is why every street sign and station name is doubled and Brussels-Midi and Brussel-Zuid are the same place. In practice the city speaks mostly French, with Dutch common around Dansaert. English is spoken almost everywhere in the centre and universally in the European Quarter.
▸ Is Brussels safe?
Normal big-city rules apply. Pickpocketing on the metro and around Gare du Midi and Gare du Nord is the real risk, and both station quarters are scruffy and best avoided on foot late at night. The centre, Ixelles and the Sablon are fine, and violent crime against visitors is rare.
More in Belgium
Antwerp
Rubens's home town, the world's diamond counter and the birthplace of Belgian fashion, all inside one walkable Flemish port.
✓ best Apr-OctArdennes (Bastogne)
Belgium's forested south: kayak rivers and castle villages wrapped around the town the 101st Airborne refused to give up.
✓ best May-Jul, SepBruges
Medieval Europe left standing almost whole, because the city went broke in the 1500s and nobody could afford to rebuild it.
✓ best Apr-Oct