Antwerp is the great city of Flanders: a port city, cosmopolitan, with a past of commercial splendour and a vibrant present of fashion, design and art. In the 16th century it was the richest and most dynamic city in Europe, the great metropolis of world trade, and that grandeur left behind a colossal Gothic cathedral, stately squares and the legacy of its most illustrious son, the painter Peter Paul Rubens, whose masterpieces still hang in its churches.
But Antwerp doesn't live on its past alone. It is the world capital of diamonds (most of the world's stones pass through its diamond district), one of Europe's fashion capitals (the legendary school that produced the 'Antwerp Six'), and a city of surprising architecture, from its Central Station, considered one of the most beautiful in the world, to the modern MAS museum by the river. All with an urban energy that's a bit rough around the edges and very proud, quite different from that of its picture-postcard neighbours.
This guide covers the essentials of Antwerp with a practical, warm approach: the Cathedral of Our Lady and the Rubens paintings, the Grote Markt with the Brabo fountain, the dazzling Central Station, the diamond district, the Plantin-Moretus printing museum, the MAS and its panoramic rooftop, Het Steen castle and the fashion scene. A large, authentic city that combines high culture and contemporary life like few others.
Antwerp owes its name to a legend: the giant Druon Antigoon demanded a toll from ships on the Scheldt and cut off the hand of anyone who refused to pay, until the Roman hero Silvius Brabo defeated him, cut off his hand and threw it into the river; hence 'hand werpen' (throwing the hand), which supposedly gave 'Antwerpen' (although the real origin of the name is probably 'aanwerp', land reclaimed from the river). The city grew as a port on the Scheldt and lived its golden age in the 16th century when, after the decline of Bruges, it became the largest commercial and financial metropolis in the world, with the first modern stock exchange and merchants from all over the globe. That splendour was cut short by the wars of religion and the Dutch Revolt: in 1585, after a siege, Antwerp was reconquered by Spain, and the closure of the Scheldt by the Dutch in the north strangled its trade for almost two centuries. The reopening of the river and the Industrial Revolution revived it as a great port in the 19th century. It was also the city of Rubens, the great Baroque master, in the 17th century. Today it is Belgium's second city, capital of diamonds and fashion. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The great historic cities of Flanders —Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp and Mechelen— were, in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, among the richest in Europe, the cradle of the Flemish Primitives, of great trade and of the art of Van Eyck and Rubens.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Few cities have an origin myth as bloody and as graphic as Antwerp's. Legend has it that in remote times a giant called Druon Antigoon controlled the river Scheldt (Schelde) and demanded a toll from every ship that passed; anyone who refused to pay had a hand cut off and thrown into the river. Until a young Roman hero, Silvius Brabo, faced the giant, beat him, cut off the giant's own hand and hurled it into the Scheldt. From that gesture, 'hand werpen' ('to throw the hand'), the name 'Antwerpen' is said to have been born. The Brabo fountain, on the Grote Markt, immortalises the scene, and the hand is today an omnipresent symbol of the city, right down to its typical sweets, the 'Antwerpse handjes' (little hands of Antwerp).
The real etymology is less spectacular: 'Antwerpen' probably derives from 'aanwerp' or 'aanwarp', meaning alluvial land won from the river, a bank or promontory beside the water. And that fits, because like the city's whole history, its name is tied to the Scheldt, the wide river that connects it with the North Sea and that would be the source of all its greatness.
The settlement's origins go back to the Early Middle Ages, with a first fortified core beside the river around the place where Het Steen castle stands today. Under local lords and then as part of the duchy of Brabant, Antwerp grew slowly as a port and trading centre through the medieval centuries, in the shadow of the then all-powerful Bruges. Its great hour, however, was still to come, and it would be dazzling.
The sixteenth century was Antwerp's century. When the arm of the sea that connected Bruges with the ocean silted up and that great city went into decline, Antwerp, on the navigable Scheldt, inherited and surpassed its role, becoming the largest commercial and financial metropolis in the world. At its peak, around the middle of the century, it was the nerve centre of European trade and of much of world trade: through its port passed spices from the Indies arriving via Portugal, precious metals from the Americas, English cloth, copper and silver from Central Europe, wine, sugar and a thousand other goods.
Antwerp filled with merchants, bankers and agents of every nation: Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, English. In 1531 a new Exchange (the Antwerp Beurs) was built, considered the first modern stock exchange designed specifically for the purpose, a model for those of London and Amsterdam. The city also became a great centre of culture and printing (the Plantin-Moretus press, now a Unesco World Heritage Site, printed works that circulated across Europe) and of art. Antwerp is reckoned to have reached some 100,000 inhabitants, a colossal figure for the time, and it was one of the richest, most populous and most cosmopolitan cities on the planet.
That splendour left its mark on the architecture: the majestic Renaissance Town Hall (1565), the guild houses of the Grote Markt, the colossal Cathedral of Our Lady, with the tallest tower in the Low Countries. This was golden Antwerp, the 'metropolis of the world', a crossroads where the money, the goods, the ideas and the art of Renaissance Europe came together.
Antwerp's greatness collapsed as fast as it had come, swept away by the wars of religion and the revolt of the Low Countries against the rule of the Spanish crown of Philip II. In 1576, in the middle of the conflict, Spanish troops mutinying over unpaid wages brutally sacked the city in an episode known as the 'Spanish Fury' (Spaanse Furie): over several days of plunder, fires and killings, thousands of people died and an enormous part of the accumulated wealth was destroyed. It was a devastating blow.
Antwerp then joined the rebellion and became for a time one of the main Protestant cities of the rebel Low Countries. But in 1585, after a long and famous siege led by the great Spanish general Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, the city capitulated and was reconquered for the Spanish crown and Catholicism. Protestants were given the choice of converting or leaving, and tens of thousands of inhabitants, among them many of the most skilled merchants, craftsmen and minds, emigrated north, above all to Amsterdam, taking their capital, their contacts and their know-how with them.
The final blow was geopolitical. The United Provinces in the north (the future Holland), independent in practice by then, controlled the mouth of the Scheldt and closed it to shipping, blocking Antwerp's access to the sea. That closing of the river, which would be maintained to varying degrees for more than two centuries, strangled the city's trade and handed its role as a great world metropolis to Amsterdam, which enjoyed its own Golden Age as a result. Antwerp, which had been the richest city in the world, entered a long and melancholy decline.
Although trade was in decline because of the closing of the Scheldt, Antwerp enjoyed an extraordinary artistic flowering in the seventeenth century that partly made up for its economic decay. The city, firmly Catholic again under the rule of the archdukes Albert and Isabella, became one of the great centres of European Baroque art, and that golden age of painting has one name above all others: Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640).
Rubens was far more than a painter: he was the great master of the Flemish Baroque, an artist of international fame and success, a humanist scholar and even a diplomat in the service of Europe's courts. Trained in Italy, he set up an enormous workshop in Antwerp that worked like a genuine 'factory' of works of art, with numerous assistants and pupils, to handle the commissions arriving from all over Europe: religious altarpieces, mythological scenes, portraits, allegories. His painting —exuberant, dynamic, sensual and intensely coloured— defined the taste of his age. His house and studio, the Rubenshuis, and above all his great works in the Cathedral of Our Lady ('The Descent from the Cross', 'The Raising of the Cross') remain essential landmarks.
A whole school shone around him: Anthony van Dyck, who would become court painter in England; Jacob Jordaens; the Brueghels of that generation; and the design of the great Baroque churches such as St Charles Borromeo. Antwerp was still, in spite of everything, a capital of art, printing and culture. But economic vitality did not return: through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, under Spanish and then Austrian rule, the city languished commercially, waiting for someone to give the Scheldt back its role as the great route to the sea.
Antwerp's rebirth came with the modern age. The Napoleonic French occupation, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had a decisive consequence: Napoleon, aware of the city's strategic value against England, ordered the port to be revived and the first modern docks built (he went so far as to call Antwerp 'a pistol aimed at the heart of England'). After Belgian independence in 1830 and the definitive reopening of the Scheldt to shipping (through a ransom payment to the Netherlands, abolished in 1863), the port of Antwerp surged back during the Industrial Revolution, becoming once more one of the largest ports in Europe and in the world, the economic engine of the city to this day.
That revival took shape in monumental works such as the spectacular Central Station (1905), 'the railway cathedral', a symbol of the confidence and prosperity of the age. In parallel, Antwerp consolidated another of its great hallmarks: the diamond. The city, with a diamond tradition going back to the fifteenth century and an important Jewish community specialising in the sector, became the world capital of diamond cutting and trading, a role it still holds.
The twentieth century brought the scars of the two world wars and the German occupation, with the deportation and extermination of much of the city's Jewish community during the Holocaust. In the second half of the century and into the twenty-first, Antwerp reinvented itself once again, now as a capital of creativity: in the 1980s, a group of designers known as the 'Antwerp Six' (led by Dries Van Noten and Ann Demeulemeester) put the city on the world map of avant-garde fashion, and since then Antwerp has been a byword for design, fashion and contemporary art, with museums such as the MAS and the renovated KMSKA. A port city, a diamond city, artistic and fashionable, today's Antwerp still looks out at the world from its river, as it did in its days of glory.
