The country's name is very old indeed. When Julius Caesar wrote his "Commentaries on the Gallic War" in the middle of the first century BC, he described three great peoples of Gaul and opened the account with a line that Belgians still repeat with pride: of them all, "the bravest are the Belgae", partly because they lived far from the refined civilisation of the Roman province and were permanently at war with the Germanic peoples on the other side of the Rhine. The Belgae were a set of Celtic and Germanic tribes —Nervii, Eburones, Treveri, Menapii— who occupied north-eastern Gaul. Caesar subdued them between 57 and 51 BC in brutal campaigns: the Nervii came close to defeating him on the river Sabis, and Ambiorix's Eburones wiped out a legion and a half before being exterminated in reprisal.
Rome organised the territory into the province of Gallia Belgica, with its capital at Reims and later with important centres such as Tongeren (Atuatuca Tungrorum), the oldest town in Belgium, and Tournai (Tornacum). For almost four centuries there was Roman peace, paved roads, farming villas and trade. But the Rhine frontier never stopped being dangerous, and from the third century onwards Germanic raids and the crisis of the Empire steadily undermined Roman order. When Rome withdrew, the vacuum was filled by the Franks, a Germanic people who had been settling peacefully in the north and who would give rise to medieval Europe.
In the fifth century, the Frankish king Clovis I united the Franks, converted to Catholic Christianity around the year 496 and founded the Merovingian dynasty, whose first great centre was precisely Tournai, where in 1653 the tomb of King Childeric I, Clovis's father, was discovered. On these lands the power of the Carolingians was later built: the family that would produce Charlemagne came from the Meuse region, between present-day Belgium and Germany, and its hereditary estates lay in the heart of what is now the country. Under Charlemagne, crowned emperor in the year 800, this area was the very core of the Empire.
Everything changed in 843 with the Treaty of Verdun, which divided Charlemagne's empire among his three grandsons. The dividing line fell right across what would become Belgium: the river Scheldt became the border between West Francia (the kingdom of France) and central Lotharingia, which later passed to the Holy Roman Empire. That medieval division, between an area under French influence and another under German imperial influence, shaped the region's politics for centuries and broadly prefigures the fracture between a south looking towards France and a north looking towards the Germanic world. With central power fragmented, the territory split into a constellation of feudal principalities: the county of Flanders, the duchy of Brabant, the prince-bishopric of Liège, the counties of Hainaut, Namur and Luxembourg.
During the Late Middle Ages, the county of Flanders became one of the richest and most urbanised regions in Europe, alongside northern Italy. The key was the textile industry: Flemish weavers imported top-quality English wool and turned it into fine cloth sold all over Europe and in the Mediterranean. Bruges, connected to the sea by the Zwin inlet, was the great port and financial market of north-western Europe, where the merchants of the Hanseatic League, of Genoa and of Venice kept trading houses; Ghent and Ypres completed the trio of great textile cities. It was an urban, commercial and combative society, with powerful guilds and a middle class that did not easily accept anyone's authority.
That civic pride collided with the king of France, who as feudal lord claimed control over Flanders. The tension exploded on 11 July 1302 at the battle of Courtrai, better known as the Battle of the Golden Spurs: a militia of Flemish craftsmen and peasants on foot crushingly defeated the noble French cavalry, and gathered hundreds of gilded spurs from the dead knights off the battlefield as trophies. It was an astonishing event —urban infantry beating the flower of feudal chivalry— and it became a symbol of Flemish freedom; today 11 July is the official holiday of the Flemish Community. The rivalry with France continued throughout the fourteenth century, with urban revolts led by figures such as Jacob van Artevelde in Ghent.
In the fifteenth century, the Valois dukes of Burgundy gradually brought together, by inheritance, marriage and purchase, most of the principalities of the Low Countries —Flanders, Brabant, Hainaut, Holland, Zeeland and more— under a single rule. Under Philip the Good (1419-1467) and his son Charles the Bold (1467-1477), the Burgundian court was one of the richest and most refined in Europe, so much so that it came to rival that of the king of France. Cities such as Brussels, Bruges and Mechelen —which housed the main institutions of government— enjoyed material and cultural splendour. This was the period in which what would later become Belgium and the Netherlands was ordered and unified administratively.
That splendour produced one of the great revolutions in Western art: the painting of the so-called Flemish Primitives. Jan van Eyck, court painter, perfected the oil technique and achieved a meticulous realism never seen before; his Polyptych of the Mystic Lamb, finished in 1432 for Ghent cathedral, is one of the supreme works in the history of art. Alongside him shone Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling —active in Bruges— and, later, the visionary Hieronymus Bosch. The Burgundian adventure ended abruptly in 1477, when Charles the Bold died at the battle of Nancy without a male heir; his daughter Mary of Burgundy married Maximilian of Habsburg, and so all these territories passed into the orbit of the powerful house of Austria.
In 1500 the man who would become the most powerful figure of his time was born in Ghent: Charles of Habsburg, the future emperor Charles V, lord of the Low Countries, king of Spain and of half the world. Under his reign, the Seventeen Provinces of the Low Countries formed a prosperous unit within an immense empire. But his son Philip II, raised in Spain and a champion of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, clashed head-on with these commercial and increasingly Protestant provinces. Fiscal pressure, absolutism, the Inquisition and religious repression set off the Eighty Years' Revolt in 1568, led by William of Orange.
The war split the territory in two. The seven northern provinces, Protestant, held out and ended up gaining independence as the Republic of the United Provinces (today's Netherlands). The ten southern provinces —the core of the future Belgium— were reconquered by the Spanish tercios of the Duke of Parma and remained under the Spanish crown and under Counter-Reformation Catholicism: these are the Spanish Netherlands. The fall of Antwerp in 1585 and the closing of the river Scheldt by the Dutch ruined the great southern port and triggered an exodus of Protestant merchants and craftsmen towards Amsterdam, which inherited its prosperity. Even so, the Catholic south had a remarkable cultural revival in the seventeenth century, embodied above all by the painter Peter Paul Rubens and his workshop in Antwerp.
After the War of the Spanish Succession, the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 transferred these provinces from the Spanish to the Austrian branch of the Habsburgs: so the Austrian Netherlands were born, governed from Vienna. The eighteenth century was generally prosperous and calm, until the centralising, anticlerical reforms of Emperor Joseph II caused an explosion: the Brabant Revolution of 1789, which went as far as proclaiming a short-lived "United Belgian States" before being put down. It was the first hint of a "Belgian" political identity.
The French Revolution changed everything. In 1795, revolutionary France annexed the territory outright, dissolved the thousand-year-old prince-bishopric of Liège and imposed its laws, its administration and compulsory military service, which set off peasant rebellions. For twenty years these lands were French departments under the Republic and then under Napoleon. The chapter closed on 18 June 1815 a few kilometres from Brussels, at the battle of Waterloo, where Napoleon's French army was defeated by Wellington's British forces and Blücher's Prussians. That defeat ended the Napoleonic era in Europe. The Congress of Vienna, wanting a barrier against France, decided to join the north and the south of the Low Countries in a single state, the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, under King William I of Orange.
The experiment of joining the Protestant, commercial north with the Catholic south lasted barely fifteen years. The people of the south —the future Belgium— felt treated as second-class subjects by King William I: Dutch imposed as the official language annoyed the French-speaking elites, the Catholic religion felt disadvantaged against the Protestantism of the north, and the more populous south was under-represented in government. The spark flew on 25 August 1830 in Brussels, after a performance of the opera "La Muette de Portici": the audience, fired up, poured into the street and the protest turned into a revolution. After fighting in the park of Brussels, the Dutch troops withdrew.
On 4 October 1830 a provisional government proclaimed Belgium's independence. The great powers, meeting at the Conference of London, recognised the new state and, to guarantee the European balance, imposed one key condition on it: perpetual neutrality. Belgium adopted a constitutional, parliamentary monarchy with one of the most liberal constitutions of its day (1831), and offered the throne to a German prince, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, who reigned as Leopold I. The Netherlands did not recognise the separation until 1839. That is how a new country was born, almost overnight: Catholic, with a ruling class that mostly spoke French, even though most of its population spoke Flemish dialects.
The Belgium of 1830 was born a French-speaking state. Although more than half the population spoke varieties of Dutch ("Flemish"), French was the only official language and the language of power, of the courts, the army, the university and the middle class across the whole country, including Flanders. Dutch was relegated to the status of a popular, rural tongue. Against that inequality the Flemish Movement arose, as early as the middle of the nineteenth century, demanding first the use of Dutch in the courts and administration of Flanders and, in time, full equality between the two languages.
The language struggle structured Belgian politics for more than a century. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth, laws were passed recognising Dutch in education, justice and administration, until in 1898 the country was officially declared bilingual. In 1962-1963 an official, fixed language border was drawn, dividing Belgium into four zones: Dutch-speaking (Flanders), French-speaking (Wallonia), the bilingual region of Brussels and a small German-speaking area in the east, incorporated after the First World War. The conflict was not only cultural: as Wallonia's old heavy industry went into decline and Flanders became the richest and most dynamic region, the language dispute also took on economic tensions. That fracture is the thread that explains Belgium's later transformation into a federal state.
The darkest chapter of Belgian history did not happen in Belgium but in the heart of Africa. King Leopold II, obsessed with giving his small country an empire, failed to get the Belgian state to take on a colonial venture and so did something extraordinary: he acquired a colony in a strictly personal capacity. At the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, the European powers recognised his sovereignty over an immense basin of the river Congo —about eighty times the size of Belgium— which Leopold named the Congo Free State and governed as private property, dressing up the exploitation in humanitarian, anti-slavery rhetoric.
What followed was a system of forced labour of extreme brutality, built first on ivory and then, with the rise of the car and the bicycle, on rubber. To extract the latex, the colonial militia, the Force Publique, imposed impossible quotas on villages and punished failure by taking hostages, burning villages, carrying out executions and mutilating people: cutting off the hands of victims —including children— became a documented practice, used by soldiers to "account" to their superiors for the cartridges they had spent. International denunciation, led by the British diplomat Roger Casement (whose 1904 report was devastating), the journalist Edmund Dene Morel and his Congo Reform Association, and missionaries who photographed the mutilations, turned the Congo into the first great humanitarian scandal of the media age.
The human cost is debated by historians because of the lack of reliable censuses, but the most widely accepted estimates point to a catastrophic fall in population: figures ranging from several million to some ten million deaths from murder, hunger, exhaustion and disease between 1885 and 1908, according to authors such as Adam Hochschild; other historians dispute and qualify those figures, but agree on the scale of the demographic catastrophe. International pressure forced Leopold to hand over the colony: in 1908 the Belgian state took it on and it became the Belgian Congo. Belgian colonial rule —more orderly but just as paternalistic and exploitative— lasted until the Congo's independence on 30 June 1960. The memory of Leopold II remains highly controversial in Belgium today, with statues of him challenged and removed.
The neutrality that had protected Belgium since 1830 collapsed on 4 August 1914, when the German army invaded in order to attack France by surprise, following the Schlieffen Plan. Belgian resistance in the forts of Liège held up the advance for a few days, but the country was almost entirely occupied. The invasion came with severe reprisals against civilians —mass executions of hostages, villages razed, the library of Leuven burned— episodes known as the "rape of Belgium" that shocked world opinion. King Albert I and his army held out for four years behind the river Yser, in the only corner of the country that was not occupied. Around Ypres some of the bloodiest battles of trench warfare were fought; it was there that the Germans first used chlorine gas on a large scale, in April 1915, and in 1917 the battle of Passchendaele left hundreds of thousands dead in a sea of mud. It is from those fields that the red poppies come, turned into a symbol of remembrance.
In May 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Belgium again. The country capitulated in eighteen days and King Leopold III surrendered and remained in German custody, a decision that deeply divided Belgians and later set off the so-called "royal question", which would end with his abdication in 1951. Under Nazi occupation the persecution of the Jews began. The transit camp at Mechelen (Kazerne Dossin), set up because of its position between Antwerp —with its large Jewish community— and Brussels, worked as an antechamber to Auschwitz: some 25,500 Jewish and Roma people were deported from there, most of them murdered in the extermination camps. Even so, more than half of Belgium's Jews survived, largely thanks to resistance networks and families who hid them; there was even a partisan attack on the twentieth deportation convoy that allowed several prisoners to escape. Belgium was liberated by the Allies in September 1944, though the German offensive in the Ardennes that winter (the Battle of the Ardennes, or the Bulge) still brought the war back onto its soil.
The post-war years brought prosperity, reconstruction and a historic shift in the country's internal map: Flanders, once agricultural and poor, became the richest and most modern region, while old industrial Wallonia, built on coal and steel, entered a long decline. That economic reversal fed the old language tension and made the old unitary, centralised state unmanageable. Between 1970 and 1993, through successive state reforms, Belgium was transformed from top to bottom into a federal state, organised into three Regions (Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels-Capital) and three language Communities (Flemish, French-speaking and German-speaking), with their own parliaments and governments and powers divided up in a devilishly complicated way. The 1993 reform put it in writing in the Constitution: "Belgium is a federal state".
That complexity has a cost: forming a government is hard, and in 2010-2011 Belgium set the world record by going 541 days without a fully fledged government because Flemish and French-speaking parties could not agree. Even so, the country functioned, and underneath it all the question of its unity is always there, stirred by a Flemish nationalism that dreams of more autonomy or even of independence. In parallel, Belgium found a role that suits it on the international stage: it was a founding member of the European Union and of NATO, and Brussels is today the de facto capital of the Union —seat of the European Commission and Council— and the headquarters of NATO, which turned it into an international, cosmopolitan city. Belgium remains a prosperous country, with a high quality of life and an identity made of contrasts: a kingdom without a single language, famous for its beer, its chocolate, its comics and a very particular way —ironic and suspicious of power— of looking at the world.
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Brussels was born, literally, out of a marsh. Its name comes from the old "Bruocsella", which means something like "settlement in the marshland", a reference to the wetlands of the river Senne valley where the first village appeared towards the end of the tenth century, when Charles, duke of Lower Lotharingia, built a fortress on an island in the river. Sitting on the trade route between Bruges and Cologne, the village grew as a market and textile-crafts centre, and in the Middle Ages it became one of the main residences of the dukes of Brabant and, later, of the Burgundian court.
The city's symbolic heart is the Grand Place (Grote Markt), one of the most beautiful squares in Europe, ringed by the Gothic town hall —with its slender tower— and the guild houses with their gilded façades. That ensemble, however, is largely a reconstruction: in August 1695, during the war against France, the army of Louis XIV bombarded Brussels for three days and flattened the centre, destroying thousands of houses. The guilds rebuilt their headquarters within a few years with defiant luxury, and that is where the opulent Baroque air admired by today's visitors comes from.
Leuven (Louvain) was the main city of the duchy of Brabant in the Late Middle Ages, rich thanks to the cloth trade, before Brussels and Antwerp overtook it. Its great treasure is the University, founded in 1425, the oldest in the historic Low Countries and one of the oldest in Europe. In the sixteenth century it was an intellectual hub of the first order: the humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam taught and worked there and founded the Trilingual College in the city, and much of the educated elite of the Catholic Low Countries came out of its lecture halls.
The city's other emblem is its town hall (stadhuis), a piece of fifteenth-century late Gothic filigree, covered in statues and pinnacles, that looks more like a jewel than a building. The modern history of the university reflects the country's fracture: in 1968, at the height of the language conflict, the old bilingual institution split in two over the conflict between Flemish and French-speaking students. The Dutch-speaking part (KU Leuven) stayed in the city; the French-speaking one left and founded a brand-new university town in Wallonia from scratch, Louvain-la-Neuve. Leuven is also the birthplace of the Stella Artois brewery, heir to a local tradition going back centuries.
A few kilometres south of Brussels, among wheat fields, one of the most decisive battles in European history was fought on 18 June 1815. Napoleon Bonaparte, who had returned from exile to take power again in France during the so-called Hundred Days, faced an allied army of British, Dutch, Belgian and German troops under the Duke of Wellington, supported by the Prussian army of Marshal Blücher, which reached the battlefield in the late afternoon and decided the fight.
The French defeat was total and put a definitive end to the Napoleonic era: Napoleon abdicated a few days later and ended up exiled on the remote island of Saint Helena, where he died. The battle left tens of thousands dead and wounded in a single day. Today the field is viewed from the Lion's Mound (Butte du Lion), a great artificial hill crowned by an iron lion, raised by the Netherlands on the spot where the Prince of Orange was wounded; from its top you look out over the whole scene of the battle. Waterloo became a universal synonym for final defeat, and its name entered the language of half the world.
Much of this region made up the historic duchy of Brabant, one of the most powerful principalities of the medieval Low Countries, which stretched across what are now the Belgian provinces of Flemish Brabant and Walloon Brabant, the Brussels region and part of the southern Netherlands (with Breda and 's-Hertogenbosch). Its dukes rivalled the counts of Flanders and its cities —Leuven, Brussels, Antwerp— were centres of trade and power.
Brabant had a strong tradition of urban liberties and resistance to absolute power. In 1356 its cities wrung a famous charter of rights out of the duchess, the "Joyeuse Entrée" (Joyous Entry), which limited the sovereign's power and was invoked for centuries. It is no accident that the first spark of a modern "Belgian" identity appeared right here: the Brabant Revolution of 1789, against the reforms of the Austrian emperor Joseph II, proclaimed a short-lived "United Belgian States". The duchy's name survives today in the two Brabant provinces and in the Belgian national anthem, which is called, precisely, "La Brabançonne".
Brussels is a unique case in Belgium: an officially bilingual island (French and Dutch) set inside the territory of Flanders, and at the same time one of the country's three federal regions, made up of nineteen municipalities. Although historically and geographically it is a Flemish city, over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it went through a strong process of Frenchification: French became the dominant language of its population, a phenomenon that is still a sensitive matter in relations between the communities. That special status makes it the most delicate knot in the whole Belgian federal structure.
From the middle of the twentieth century, Brussels took on a role that projected it onto the world: it became the de facto capital of the European Union. It hosts the European Commission and the Council of the Union, and in its European quarter, around Schuman square, tens of thousands of officials and diplomats from across the continent work; it is also the headquarters of NATO. This international vocation sits alongside the memory of Robert Schuman and the founding fathers of European integration, and it turned a medium-sized city into a cosmopolitan capital, with a huge foreign community and an intense diplomatic life.
Brussels has a playful, eccentric side that is part of its identity. Its most popular symbol is the Manneken Pis, the small bronze statue of a boy urinating, from the end of the seventeenth century, which the city dresses in hundreds of different costumes depending on the occasion and around which all sorts of legends have grown. It is a perfect emblem of Belgian humour and self-irony.
In architecture, Brussels was one of the cradles of Art Nouveau: at the end of the nineteenth century, the architect Victor Horta revolutionised design with houses of curving lines, iron and glass, several of them now World Heritage Sites. From the great optimistic industrial leap of the post-war years came the Atomium, the giant structure representing an iron cell magnified 165 billion times, built for the 1958 World's Fair and turned into an icon of the city. And Belgium is, by right, the homeland of the European comic: Brussels and its school produced Hergé, creator of Tintin, and a whole comics tradition —the Smurfs, Lucky Luke— that the city celebrates with murals along its streets and a museum devoted to the so-called "ninth art".
Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, Bruges was one of the richest cities in northern Europe, the financial and commercial capital of the whole north-west of the continent. Its secret was water: an arm of the sea, the Zwin, connected it to the North Sea and made it a great port. The trading houses of the Hanseatic League and of the Italian merchants —Genoese, Venetian, Florentine— set up there, and Bruges was home to what many consider one of the first stock exchanges in the world, around the house of the Van der Beurse family, from which the Spanish word for the exchange, "bolsa", is said to derive.
That prosperity faded almost poetically: over the fifteenth century, the Zwin silted up and Bruges lost its outlet to the sea, while trade moved to Antwerp. The city entered a long decline that froze it in time, and for centuries it was an impoverished, half-asleep place. That same decline saved it: since nobody modernised or demolished it, it kept its medieval brick centre, its canals and its belfry intact. At the end of the nineteenth century, the novel "Bruges-la-Morte" by Georges Rodenbach popularised its melancholy image, and since then the city has been reborn as one of the great tourist destinations of Europe, today a World Heritage Site.
In the Middle Ages, Ghent (Gent) was one of the biggest cities in Europe north of the Alps, second only to Paris, and one of the proudest and most unruly. Its wealth came from cloth, and its strength from combative guilds that made the city a permanent focus of rebellion against its lords. In the fourteenth century, the leader Jacob van Artevelde headed an uprising and allied Ghent with England to secure the wool supply during the Hundred Years' War.
That untameable character clashed with Emperor Charles V himself, who had been born in the city in 1500. In 1539-1540, Ghent rose against imperial taxes, and Charles punished it harshly: he abolished its privileges and forced its notables to parade in penance with a noose around their necks. That is where the nickname the people of Ghent still take pride in comes from: "stroppendragers", the "noose bearers". The city's artistic jewel is the Polyptych of the Mystic Lamb (or Ghent Altarpiece), painted by the Van Eyck brothers and finished in 1432 for St Bavo's Cathedral: a revolutionary work, stolen and recovered so many times over history that it is one of the paintings with the most eventful biography in the world. Today Ghent combines its enormous heritage with the energy of a big university city.
When Bruges lost its outlet to the sea, the great port of the Low Countries became Antwerp (Antwerpen), on the banks of the river Scheldt. During the sixteenth century, Antwerp lived a golden age and became the richest city in Europe: a good share of world trade passed through its port, including silver from the Americas and spices from Asia, and the most important financial market on the continent operated there. It was also a great centre of printing, with the workshop of Christophe Plantin, now a World Heritage museum.
That splendour was broken by the war against Spain. In 1585, after a long siege, the Duke of Parma reconquered Antwerp for the Spanish crown; the Protestants had to leave and the United Provinces in the north closed the river Scheldt to shipping, strangling the city's trade to the benefit of Amsterdam. Even so, Antwerp had a brilliant cultural seventeenth century around the figure of the painter Peter Paul Rubens, whose house and whose works still shape the city. In the nineteenth century, with the Scheldt reopened, Antwerp recovered its role as a great port —today one of the largest in Europe— and established itself as the world capital of the diamond trade, an activity historically tied to its Jewish community and, later, to traders from all over the world.
Mechelen (Malines), today a quiet city between Brussels and Antwerp, had its moment of glory at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when it was nothing less than the capital of the Burgundian Low Countries. Margaret of Austria, aunt and regent of the future Charles V, governed there, setting up her court in the city and turning it into a refined political and cultural centre, the seat of the main institutions of justice and government for all the Low Countries.
From that period Mechelen keeps a rich heritage, dominated by the imposing tower of St Rumbold's Cathedral, a Gothic mass that was left unfinished and from whose top you can see as far as Antwerp on clear days. The city is famous for its bell tradition: the art of the carillon —playing melodies on the bells of a tower— is so closely tied to it that in several languages the word for "carillon" derives from its name. Mechelen is also the primatial see of the Catholic Church in Belgium: its archbishop is the country's primate. And its heritage includes the secluded beguinages (begijnhoven), those clusters of little houses around a courtyard where the beguines lived, recognised as World Heritage Sites.
What makes these cities "art cities" is not only their architecture, but the fact that they were the setting for one of the greatest revolutions in European painting: that of the so-called Flemish Primitives, in the fifteenth century. At the Burgundian court and in the rich textile cities, artists worked who took realism to an unknown degree, perfecting the technique of oil painting, which allowed transparent layers, highlights and meticulous detail impossible with tempera.
Jan van Eyck, active in Bruges and Ghent, is the central figure: works of his such as the Arnolfini Portrait or the Mystic Lamb dazzled the whole of Europe and even influenced Italian Renaissance painting. Alongside him shone Rogier van der Weyden, master of religious emotion; Hans Memling, the painter par excellence of prosperous Bruges; Hugo van der Goes; and, in a fantastical, moralising key, the brilliant Hieronymus Bosch. This painted heritage, scattered today among the museums and cathedrals of Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp, is one of the great reasons to travel through the cities of Flanders, which preserve not only the paintings but the same urban setting in which they were created.
Today's Flanders —the Dutch-speaking north of Belgium— is much more than an open-air museum. After centuries in which its language was pushed aside in favour of French, and after a long spell as a poor, agricultural region, Flanders took a historic turn in the second half of the twentieth century: it became the richest, most populous and most dynamic region in the country, with an economy geared to services, logistics —the port of Antwerp— and high-tech industries.
That economic rise went hand in hand with a strong assertion of Flemish identity. Dutch is today the only official language of the region, which has its own institutions, parliament and government. In politics, Flemish nationalism is a central force: parties demanding greater autonomy —or outright independence for Flanders— carry decisive weight, and the balance between Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia is the permanent axis of Belgian politics. All that debate coexists, however, with a prosperous daily life and with cities that draw millions of visitors for their heritage, their food, their beer and their festivals.
The province of West Flanders (West-Vlaanderen) is the north-western corner of Belgium, the only one with an outlet to the sea. It is a land of contrasts: to the west, the country's only strip of coast, with its beaches and seaside resorts; inland, a fertile plain of polders won back from the water, dotted with villages, belfries and farmland. Its capital is Bruges, but the province also includes historic towns such as Kortrijk (Courtrai), scene of the Battle of the Golden Spurs, and the whole region of the First World War front.
This is a deeply Flemish area, Dutch-speaking and with a strong local identity, with its own western dialects. The nearness of the sea and the border with France shaped its history: armies passed through here for centuries, and in the twentieth century the province ended up at the centre of the catastrophe of the Great War. Today it combines beach tourism, the weight of war remembrance and a farming and fishing economy, along with the industry around its cities.
Ostend (Oostende) started out as a modest fishing village, but in the nineteenth century it turned into Belgium's great seaside resort, "the queen of the beaches". Its great promoter was King Leopold II, who loved the city and filled it with monumental buildings, promenades and galleries: he wanted to make it a resort on a par with the great ones of Europe. Ostend became fashionable among the aristocracy and the upper middle class, drawn by its sea bathing, its racecourse and its casino.
From that period the long seafront promenade (the Albert I-promenade), the broad beach and the air of nineteenth-century elegance remain. Ostend was also the city of the painter James Ensor, one of the great forerunners of modern art, famous for his unsettling masks and skeletons, who lived almost his whole life there. For a long time the city was also the terminal of the ferry that crossed the North Sea to England, which made it a gateway for British travellers. Today Ostend combines its seaside tradition with a notable street art and contemporary art scene.
The whole Belgian coast is only about 67 kilometres long, but it is used to the full: an almost unbroken succession of resorts, sea walls and apartment blocks facing the beach, from Knokke-Heist on the Dutch border to De Panne next to France. It is the Belgians' great seaside escape, with its beach huts, its pedal carts on the sand and its mussels-and-fries places.
One thread ties the whole coast together: the Kusttram, the coastal tram, which runs along almost the entire shoreline from end to end and is considered one of the longest tram lines in the world. It has been running since the end of the nineteenth century and lets you go from one resort to the next with a view of the sea. The coast also carries the scars of war: during the Second World War the Germans fortified it as part of the Atlantic Wall, and bunkers and batteries are still preserved, such as the Atlantikwall at Raversyde, near Ostend, now an open-air museum.
In the Middle Ages, Ypres (Ieper) was one of the three great textile cities of Flanders, so rich that it built an enormous Cloth Hall as a symbol of its power. But its name went down in history for another reason: between 1914 and 1918 it was the centre of one of the bloodiest sectors of the Western Front in the First World War. The "Ypres Salient", a bulge in the Allied front pushing into the German lines, was the scene of three great battles and of constant fighting for four years.
Some of the most terrible episodes of the war happened there. At the Second Battle of Ypres, in April 1915, the German army used chlorine gas on a large scale for the first time on the Western Front, opening the era of chemical warfare; the name "yperite", for mustard gas, comes from the name of the city. In 1917, the Third Battle of Ypres, known as Passchendaele, was fought in a landscape of mud and flooded craters and left hundreds of thousands of casualties for a few kilometres of ground. Ypres was literally flattened, reduced to rubble. After the war the city was rebuilt stone by stone in its medieval form, in a deliberate act of resurrection.
The fields around Ypres became the great place of First World War remembrance in the English-speaking world. It was there that the Canadian military doctor John McCrae wrote the poem "In Flanders Fields" in 1915, inspired by the red poppies growing among the graves of the fallen; out of that poem came the poppy as the universal symbol of remembrance for dead soldiers, still worn on the lapel every November in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth.
In the city stands the Menin Gate, a huge monument inaugurated in 1927 on which are engraved the names of tens of thousands of British and Commonwealth soldiers who went missing in the Salient with no known grave. Since 1928, every night of the year except during the German occupation, the firefighters of Ypres have played the "Last Post" under the gate in tribute to the fallen, an unbroken ceremony that moves visitors. The whole region is dotted with immaculately kept military cemeteries and with museums such as the In Flanders Fields, and nearby towns like Poperinge —with the Talbot House rest home— also hold their place in this geography of remembrance.
The trenches of the river Yser did not only leave the dead: they also left a lasting political mark on Flanders. In the Belgian army of the First World War the rank and file were mostly Flemish and Dutch-speaking, but the officers and the high command gave their orders in French. Many Flemish soldiers felt they were dying for a homeland that did not even speak their language, and out of that experience came deep resentment and a movement of protest within the front line, the so-called "Front Movement" (Frontbeweging).
That trauma fed Flemish nationalism between the wars. Its symbol is the Yser Tower (IJzertoren) in Diksmuide, a huge monument raised in memory of the fallen Flemish soldiers, with the initials "AVV-VVK" ("All for Flanders, Flanders for Christ"). The original tower was dynamited in 1946 in circumstances that were never fully cleared up, and was later rebuilt taller; today it houses a museum for peace and remains a place of pilgrimage for the Flemish movement. The province that suffered most from the war was thus also one of the cradles of the national consciousness that would later transform the whole of Belgium.
Wallonia (Wallonie) is the southern, French-speaking half of Belgium, separated from Flanders by the language border that crosses the country from west to east. The name "Walloon" comes from an old Germanic root that Germanic peoples used to name speakers of Romance languages, the same one that gave "Welsh" and "Wallachian". As well as French, Wallonia historically spoke Romance languages of its own, now in retreat: Walloon, Picard and Lorrain, dialects with their own literature and tradition.
Geographically, Wallonia is crossed by the rivers Meuse and Sambre, which draw the axis around which its main cities are arranged —Namur, Liège, Charleroi, Mons— and along which its industry was concentrated. To the south and east, the land rises towards the wooded plateau of the Ardennes. In the nineteenth century Wallonia was Belgium's industrial engine and one of the first industrialised regions in the world; in the twentieth century it went through the decline of that heavy industry and a difficult process of reconversion. Its history and its identity are quite different from those of the Flemish north.
Liège has a history of its own within Belgium. For almost eight centuries, from the year 985 until 1795, it was not part of any secular county or duchy but an independent ecclesiastical state: the prince-bishopric of Liège, ruled by a prince-bishop who was both religious authority and temporal sovereign, and part of the Holy Roman Empire. Its cultural founder was Bishop Notger, around the year 1000, who made the city a great religious, artistic and intellectual centre, so much so that it was called "the Athens of the North".
That long separate path ended with the French Revolution: in 1789 the Liège Revolution broke out, in parallel with the French one, and in 1795 France annexed the principality and dissolved it. In the nineteenth century, Liège became an industrial giant. It was one of the first cities on the continent to industrialise, thanks to the coal under its soil and to metalworking; there the entrepreneur John Cockerill built one of the largest steel complexes in Europe. Liège is to this day a big, warm, bustling city, proud of its character, famous for its huge Sunday market at La Batte, its waffles and for being the birthplace of the writer Georges Simenon, creator of Inspector Maigret.
Tournai (Doornik) is one of the oldest cities in Belgium and one with the most unusual history. In Roman times it was Tornacum, and in the fifth century it became the first capital of the Merovingian Franks: it was the city of Childeric I, father of Clovis, the king who united the Franks and founded what would become France. Childeric's tomb, discovered in Tournai in 1653 with a dazzling treasure, is one of the most important archaeological finds of the European Early Middle Ages.
Because of its border position, Tournai changed hands many times and for long periods belonged directly to France; it was even briefly English, when King Henry VIII occupied it between 1513 and 1519. Its jewel is the Cathedral of Our Lady, an imposing Romanesque and Gothic church with five bell towers, which together with the municipal belfry —the oldest in Belgium— is recognised as a World Heritage Site. Tournai was also a great centre of tapestry production and of late Gothic sculpture. The city suffered heavy bombing in 1940, but preserves a remarkable medieval heritage.
Namur (Namen), the political capital of Wallonia, stands at a strategic point: the meeting of the rivers Meuse and Sambre, dominated by a huge citadel on a rocky spur. That position made the city a coveted stronghold, besieged again and again over history; its citadel, enlarged over centuries, was taken by Louis XIV in person in 1692 and recaptured a few years later. Namur is also the gateway to the Ardennes.
The Ardennes are a region of wooded plateaus, deep valleys and stone villages that stretches across south-eastern Belgium and continues into Luxembourg and France. Thinly populated and with a harsh climate, it is today a destination for nature, hiking and getaways, with picturesque villages like Durbuy, which claims to be "the smallest city in the world". But those same forests were the scene of one of the toughest battles of the Second World War: in the winter of 1944-1945, the German offensive in the Ardennes —the Battle of the Bulge— was Hitler's last great counterattack in the west, and its most famous episode was the siege of the town of Bastogne, whose American garrison held out surrounded until it was relieved.
Along the axis of the Meuse and the Sambre, from Mons to Liège by way of Charleroi, runs the "sillon industriel", the industrial belt where Wallonia led one of the first industrial revolutions on the European continent in the nineteenth century. The ground was full of coal, and on top of it rose mines, blast furnaces, glassworks and a powerful steel industry that made Belgium an economic power far above its size. It was a rich, working-class, combative region, the cradle of a strong trade union and socialist movement.
That world came to a hard end. Coal mining also left a mark of tragedy: on 8 August 1956, the Marcinelle disaster, at the Bois du Cazier pit near Charleroi, killed 262 miners, most of them Italian immigrants, and became a symbol of the sacrifice of migrant workers and the trigger for improvements in mine safety; the site is a World Heritage Site today. From the middle of the twentieth century, coal and steel went into an unstoppable decline: the mines closed, the steelworks went cold and Wallonia went from being the country's rich region to dragging along unemployment and reconversion, while Flanders took the lead. That economic reversal lies behind the tensions that reshaped the whole of Belgium.
Wallonia keeps a very much living folklore, with festivals going back centuries. The most famous is the Ducasse de Mons, popularly known as the "Doudou": every year, after a religious procession, the city revives the "Lumeçon", a theatrical fight between St George and the dragon in the main square, in the middle of a fervent crowd; the festival is recognised by Unesco as Intangible Cultural Heritage. Mons, capital of the province of Hainaut, also has an elegant old town crowned by a Baroque belfry, likewise a World Heritage Site, and it was European Capital of Culture in 2015. On its outskirts, in August 1914, the British army fought its first engagement of the First World War, the battle of Mons.
Further south, spectacularly wedged between a cliff and the river Meuse, is Dinant, dominated by its onion-domed collegiate church and its citadel on the rock. Dinant is the birthplace of Adolphe Sax, the inventor of the saxophone, born there in 1814, and the town celebrates him everywhere. The region also produced other figures in art and music, and it keeps a strong food and brewing tradition. Between the folklore of the processions, the castles, the rivers and the forests, Wallonia offers a Belgium different from that of the Flemish cities: more rural, more French-speaking and with a character all its own.