Brussels is a capital that puzzles you at first and ends up winning you over. It doesn't have the instant postcard appeal of Bruges or the glamour of Paris, but it hides one of the most beautiful squares in the world, the Grand Place, a golden jewel box of Baroque guildhalls that dazzles by day and, above all, when lit up at night. Around it unfolds a city of contrasts: surreal and pragmatic, royal and European, stately and scruffy, capital of Belgium and, in practice, capital of the European Union.
It is also a city of good living, Belgian style: the home of chocolate and pralines, of more than a thousand beers, of mussels with fries (moules-frites), of waffles and of an absurd sense of humour embodied in the Manneken Pis, the little bronze boy who has been calmly peeing since the 17th century, and in the art of René Magritte, who has his great museum here. It is the birthplace of European comics, from Tintin to the Smurfs, with murals all over the city.
This guide covers the essentials of Brussels with a practical, warm eye: the Grand Place and the covered galleries, the great art museums, the Atomium inherited from Expo 58, the European Quarter, the antique-filled Sablon and the down-to-earth Marolles, plus how to get around by metro and tram and which day trips are worth it. A city to enjoy at an easy pace, between an abbey beer and a cone of fries.
Brussels was born around the year 979 as a settlement on an island in the river Senne, on the trade route between Cologne and the Flemish cities. Its name comes from the Old Dutch 'Broekzele', the 'settlement in the marsh'. It grew as a city of guilds and merchants under the Dukes of Brabant, and in the 15th century it became one of the residences of the Dukes of Burgundy, reaching great splendour. It then passed into the orbit of the Habsburgs and the Spanish Empire: it was here that Charles V abdicated in 1555. In 1695, the troops of Louis XIV of France bombarded the city and destroyed the Grand Place, which the guilds rebuilt in just a few years in the lavish Baroque style we admire today. After the Austrian, French and Dutch periods, Brussels was the stage for the 1830 revolution that gave birth to independent Belgium, of which it became the capital. The 20th century established it as the seat of international institutions: Expo 58 (with its Atomium) marked its modernisation, and since then it has consolidated its role as capital of the European Union. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The political centre of Belgium and of Europe: Brussels, bilingual capital and seat of the European Union; Leuven, with one of the oldest universities on the continent; and Waterloo, where Napoleon fell. All within the old duchy of Brabant.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Brussels keeps its origin in its very name. The most widely accepted form derives it from the Old Dutch 'Broekzele' or 'Bruocsella', meaning roughly 'settlement in the marsh' (from 'broek', marshland or waterlogged ground, and 'sella', settlement). And indeed the city was born in a low, damp area, on an island and on the banks of the river Senne (Zenne), a tributary that today runs almost entirely in culverts beneath the centre but that was its reason for being for centuries.
Tradition places the founding around the year 979, when Charles of Lower Lotharingia is said to have set up a fortification on the island of Saint-Géry, on the Senne. The location was no accident: Brussels lay on the overland trade route linking the prosperous cities of Flanders (Bruges, Ghent) with Cologne and the Rhine. That crossroads, added to the navigable river, turned the small river port into a centre of trade and exchange.
Through the eleventh and twelfth centuries, under the counts of Leuven, who would later be dukes of Brabant, Brussels grew as a merchant and craft city, famous for its luxury fabrics and tapestries. The first walls went up (a first ring in the thirteenth century, of which remains still stand, such as the Black Tower next to Sainte-Catherine) and the city organised itself around powerful guilds. Trade, the textile industry and its strategic position built a prosperity that would attract, centuries later, the most brilliant courts in Europe.
The great leap for Brussels came in the fifteenth century, when it entered the orbit of the dukes of Burgundy. Under Philip the Good and his successors, the city became one of the favourite residences of a court that was then among the richest and most refined in Europe. On the Coudenberg hill an imposing ducal palace was raised, and Brussels flourished as a centre of art, tapestry, goldsmithing and political power, overtaking even old Flemish rivals.
By inheritance, the duchy of Brabant and the Burgundian Low Countries passed to the House of Habsburg. Brussels thus became one of the capitals of the vast empire of Charles V (Charles I of Spain), who was raised in the Low Countries and counted the city among his seats of government. Here, in the Coudenberg palace, one of the most famous episodes in European history took place in 1555: the abdication of Charles V, who divided his empire between his son Philip II (Spain and the Low Countries) and his brother Ferdinand (the Empire).
That same Coudenberg palace, the scene of so much history, burned down in a fire in 1731 and its ruins were buried beneath the present Place Royale; today they can be visited at an underground archaeological site. The Habsburg period also brought religious and political tensions that would lead to the revolt of the Low Countries against Philip II. Brussels, unlike the northern provinces that would form Holland, remained under Catholic and Spanish rule (the so-called Spanish Netherlands), with the city as administrative capital.
The event that shaped the most famous image of Brussels was, paradoxically, a catastrophe. In August 1695, during the Nine Years' War, the troops of Louis XIV of France, under Marshal de Villeroy, bombarded the city for three days from the outskirts. It was a disproportionate punishment, in reprisal for Allied attacks on French ports. The guns and the fire flattened the heart of Brussels: thousands of buildings are reckoned to have burned, and the Grand Place, then the market and civic centre, with its wooden houses and the guild headquarters, was devastated.
The city's response, however, was extraordinary. In barely four years, the powerful guilds rebuilt their houses around the square, this time in stone and with unprecedented aesthetic ambition. Each corporation (the bakers, the brewers, the tailors, the archers) competed to raise the most sumptuous façade, with Baroque pediments, sculptures, columns and abundant gilded detail. The result is the harmonious, spectacular ensemble we admire today, one of the most complete examples of urban Baroque architecture in Europe, declared a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1998.
The Gothic Town Hall, from the fifteenth century, with its 96-metre tower, had partly survived the bombardment and presided over the reconstruction. So the Grand Place condenses the history of Brussels into a single space: the haughty municipal tower of medieval communal power and the opulent guild houses of the Baroque revival after the destruction. That the city's greatest beauty was born of its greatest misfortune is, perhaps, very much in keeping with the resilient and slightly surrealist spirit of this capital.
After Spanish and then Austrian rule over the Southern Netherlands, and an interlude under revolutionary and Napoleonic France, the Congress of Vienna of 1815 joined the northern and southern territories into a single United Kingdom of the Netherlands, under King William I of Orange. But the union between the Protestant, Dutch-speaking north and the largely Catholic and largely French-speaking south was tense from the start, for religious, political, linguistic and economic reasons.
The explosion came in Brussels. On the night of 25 August 1830, after a performance of the opera 'La Muette de Portici' at the Theatre of the Mint (La Monnaie / De Munt), whose patriotic theme fired people up, the audience poured into the street and set off an insurrection. The street fighting concentrated around the park of Brussels, where the revolutionaries held out against the Dutch troops. The revolution succeeded and Belgium's independence was proclaimed.
A National Congress drew up a constitution that was liberal for its time and offered the throne to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, who in 1831 became Leopold I, first king of the Belgians. Brussels was designated capital of the new state. Over the nineteenth century, the city was profoundly transformed: the polluted river Senne was culverted and great Parisian-style boulevards were laid out, the colossal Palace of Justice went up and, under the reign of Leopold II, monuments such as the Cinquantenaire Park. The wealth of that period was also tied, darkly, to the brutal colonial exploitation of the Congo by Leopold II, a chapter Belgium reviews critically today.
The twentieth century was intense for Brussels. During the First and Second World Wars the city was occupied by German troops, though it suffered less physical destruction than other parts of Belgium. The Jewish community of Brussels was persecuted and deported during the Nazi occupation, mostly through the Mechelen transit camp on the way to Auschwitz. The city was liberated in September 1944.
The great post-war landmark was the World's Fair of 1958, Expo 58, the first international exhibition after the conflict. It was a huge showcase of technological optimism and reconstruction, and it left the city its most recognisable modern symbol: the Atomium, the giant iron crystal cell designed by André Waterkeyn, conceived as an emblem of the atomic age and of peaceful progress. The Expo modernised infrastructure, drew millions of visitors and projected Brussels to the world.
In parallel, the city was taking on a role that would define it to this day: that of capital of European integration. From the 1950s, Brussels gradually took in the institutions of the Community and then of the European Union. Today it is the seat of the European Commission (the Berlaymont building), of the Council of the EU and of much of the activity of the European Parliament, as well as the headquarters of NATO. That European quarter, around Schuman square, sits alongside historic Brussels and a complex social reality: a city officially bilingual in French and Dutch, deeply cosmopolitan and multicultural, with large communities of North African, sub-Saharan, Turkish and other origins. Capital of a complicated federal country and de facto capital of Europe, today's Brussels is still, as it was at its origin, a crossroads of routes and cultures.
