Dinant is probably the most photogenic town in Belgium. Picture a row of houses packed onto a narrow strip of land, caught between a huge grey rock cliff and the River Meuse. Up above, on the clifftop, a citadel keeps watch over the valley. Down below, at the water's edge, rises the Collegiate Church of Notre-Dame with its unmistakable onion-shaped dome. And boats and kayaks glide along the river. It is one of those scenes that look too perfect to be real.
But Dinant is more than a spectacular backdrop. It is the birthplace of Adolphe Sax, the genius who invented the saxophone in the 19th century, and the town celebrates him everywhere, with giant colourful saxophones lining its bridge over the Meuse. It is a land of abbey beer (the famous Leffe was born here) and of a hard, traditional biscuit, the couque de Dinant. And it is the perfect base for outdoor adventure in the Ardennes: kayaking down the winding River Lesse, exploring underground caves or cruising through the Meuse valley by boat.
This guide covers Dinant with a practical, friendly eye: how to get up to the citadel and what to see there, the collegiate church, Adolphe Sax's house, the Meuse quays, kayaking on the Lesse and the caves in the surrounding area, plus how to get there from Namur or Brussels and how to combine it with the rest of Wallonia. Whether you come for a few hours or stay on to explore the Ardennes, Dinant leaves you with one of the loveliest images of any trip to Belgium.
Dinant grew up on the banks of the Meuse in ancient times thanks to its strategic position and its industry of worked copper and brass, the famous 'dinanderie', which brought it fame and wealth in the Middle Ages. That prosperity, and its rivalry with neighbouring Bouvignes, also made it a target: in 1466, Charles the Bold of Burgundy brutally sacked and razed the town. A stronghold fought over for centuries for its value on the river, Dinant lived through its most tragic episode in August 1914, when German troops invading Belgium executed hundreds of civilians and set the town on fire. In the 19th century, Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxophone, had been born here. All of this, from medieval copper to the 1914 massacre and the saxophone, is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓French-speaking Belgium in the south: the old prince-bishopric of Liège, Merovingian Tournai, fortified Namur, the forests of the Ardennes and the industrial heartland of coal and steel, cradle of Walloon folklore and of Adolphe Sax.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Dinant was born of a whim of geography: a narrow strip of land on the banks of the Meuse, squeezed against a rock cliff. An awkward place to live, but a privileged one for trade, because the river was a great transport route and the town sat at a crossroads between the Germanic and the French worlds. Occupied since antiquity and tied in the Middle Ages to the powerful prince-bishopric of Liège, Dinant soon found the source of its fortune: metal.
Copper arrived along the Meuse (brought from the mines of the Aachen region and the Meuse valley), and Dinant's craftsmen worked it with a mastery that became famous across Europe. They made objects in brass and worked copper —baptismal fonts, lecterns, candlesticks, tableware, cauldrons— of such quality and renown that the art of working beaten copper came to be called, after the town's name, 'dinanderie'. That word survives today in several languages for metalwork in copper and brass.
Thanks to dinanderie, Dinant became a prosperous, well-connected town, a member of the Hansa (the league of trading cities), with its merchants selling all over Europe. But wealth attracts envy and rivalry. Facing it, on the other side of the river, stood the town of Bouvignes, a competitor and often an enemy. And a far more dangerous neighbour cast his shadow over Dinant: the duke of Burgundy.
In the fifteenth century, the dukes of Burgundy were building a powerful state that joined much of what are now the Netherlands and Belgium. Dinant, on the other hand, was part of the prince-bishopric of Liège, which stubbornly resisted falling under Burgundian rule. The town, unruly and proud, joined the Liège revolts against Burgundy, and its people went as far as hurling grave insults at the count of Charolais, the Burgundian heir: the future Charles the Bold.
The revenge was terrible. In 1466, Philip the Good and his son Charles laid siege to Dinant. The town fell after brief resistance, and what followed was one of the most brutal massacres of the Late Middle Ages. The Burgundian troops thoroughly sacked Dinant and burned it to the ground. According to the chronicles, hundreds of inhabitants were tied together in pairs and thrown into the Meuse to drown. The town was left flattened, its population decimated and its prosperous copper industry destroyed.
Dinant took generations to recover, and it never again reached the splendour of medieval dinanderie. The sack of 1466 was engraved in the town's memory as the first of a series of disasters. Because, given its strategic position on the Meuse, Dinant was condemned to be, again and again, a contested stronghold and a battlefield. The rock that protected it was also what made it a military target.
Over the following centuries, Dinant followed the fate of the Meuse lands, passing from hand to hand at the rhythm of Europe's wars: the French of Louis XIV took and fortified it, then came Austrian Habsburg rule, then revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and after Napoleon's fall, the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. It was the Dutch who, in the nineteenth century, rebuilt the imposing citadel that crowns the cliff today, in order to control the river crossing. In 1830, with Belgian independence, Dinant became part of the new country.
In the middle of that military history, the town gave the world one of its most brilliant sons. In 1814 Adolphe Sax was born in Dinant, the son of a musical instrument maker. Trained in his father's workshop and later in Brussels and Paris, Sax was a prodigious inventor who improved and created numerous wind instruments. His masterpiece, patented around 1846, was the saxophone: a metal instrument with a reed that combined the power of brass with the agility of woodwind, and which, although slow to catch on, would end up revolutionising music, above all with the arrival of jazz in the twentieth century.
Adolphe Sax lived and worked in Paris, where he had successes and also bitter legal battles with rival makers who disputed his patents, and he died there in 1894, not without money troubles. But his home town never forgot him. Today Dinant celebrates Sax everywhere: in the space devoted to his life, in the statues and, above all, in the big colourful saxophones that decorate the bridge over the Meuse. The inventor of the saxophone is the town's best-loved ambassador.
The most tragic episode in Dinant's modern history came in the first days of the First World War. In August 1914 the German army invaded neutral Belgium on its way to France. On reaching the Meuse, the troops met resistance, and in Dinant there was fighting between Germans and French for control of the bridges and the town. In that context of war and jumpy nerves, one of the worst atrocities of the invasion of Belgium was unleashed.
Convinced —falsely— that civilians were shooting at them (the myth of the 'snipers' or francs-tireurs, which served as a pretext for numerous German reprisals in Belgium in 1914), the German soldiers turned on the people of Dinant. On 23 August 1914, German army troops summarily executed hundreds of civilians —men, women, the elderly and children— rounded up and shot in groups at different points around the town. The figures usually put the number of inhabitants murdered at around 674, in a population of a few thousand. The town was also looted and burned, and much of it was left in ruins.
The Dinant massacre was one of the bloodiest committed against Belgian civilians in August 1914, alongside those at Leuven, Aarschot, Andenne and Tamines, events that shocked international opinion and fed Allied propaganda about the 'rape of Belgium'. Rebuilt once again after the war, Dinant keeps the memory of those tragic days in monuments and plaques around the town. It was, once more, a community that had to rise from its ashes.
After the wounds of the twentieth century —the 1914 massacre was followed by fresh fighting and damage in 1940 and in the Ardennes offensive of 1944-45— Dinant rebuilt its narrow row of houses between the rock and the water one more time, and found its definitive calling in tourism. Today, with some 14,000 inhabitants, the small town lives largely off its spectacular beauty and its position as the gateway to the Ardennes.
Its unique setting —the onion-domed collegiate church at the foot of the cliff, the citadel cut out against the sky, the river sliding between walls of rock— has made it one of the most reproduced postcards of Belgium and a classic day trip from Namur and Brussels. To its scenic appeal it adds heritage (the citadel, the collegiate church), culture (the omnipresent legacy of Adolphe Sax) and, above all, nature and adventure: cruises on the Meuse, kayaking down the winding river Lesse, stalactite caves and trails through the Ardennes forests.
Dinant is also a land of food traditions, such as the couque de Dinant —a hard biscuit of flour and honey, more to admire than to eat— and abbey beer, linked to the nearby monastery of Leffe. Every summer the town fills with visitors who climb up to the citadel, take photos beside the saxophones on the bridge and cruise the river. Out of the prosperous medieval copper town, razed by Charles the Bold and by the German army of 1914, has survived a jewel of the Meuse that, against all odds, has turned its dramatic history and its impossible geography into its greatest treasure.
