Mons is a city that knows how to shine. Capital of Hainaut, perched on its hill in western Wallonia, it has an elegant old town crowned by a Baroque belfry so unusual that it's the only one of its style in Belgium and, together with the country's other belfries, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. But Mons doesn't live on old stone alone: it was European Capital of Culture in 2015, and that year transformed the city, renewing its museums, its public spaces and its cultural ambitions.
It's a city of fascinating contrasts. It hosts the colourful, crowded Ducasse or 'Doudou', a centuries-old popular festival —with St George's battle against the dragon and the procession of St Waudru's golden carriage— that is listed as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. At the same time, it's home to a university, NATO's military headquarters in Europe (SHAPE is very close by) and cutting-edge cultural institutions such as the Mundaneum, that astonishing early 20th-century 'paper Google'. And around it lies the mining Borinage, where a young Vincent van Gogh lived and decided to become a painter.
This guide explores Mons with a practical, warm eye: what to see on the Grand-Place and in the old town, the Collegiate Church of St Waudru, the climb up the belfry, the renovated museums, the Doudou festival, and the mining and Van Gogh sites nearby, plus how to get there from Brussels and how to get around this hilly city. Cultured, festive and authentic, Mons is one of Belgium's most interesting and least predictable getaways.
Mons grew out of a monastery founded on a hill in the 7th century by St Waudru (Waltrude), around which the town developed; its name comes from the Latin 'mons' (mount). Capital of the powerful County of Hainaut in the Middle Ages, it was a strategic stronghold, fought over and fortified for centuries by the Burgundians, Spanish, French, Dutch and Austrians, and besieged many times (Louis XIV, Vauban). In 1914 and 1918 it saw fighting in the First World War: the Battle of Mons in August 1914 was the British Army's first engagement of the war, and the area was liberated by Canadian troops on 11 November 1918. Van Gogh lived in its Borinage coalfield. It was European Capital of Culture in 2015. It's all 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.
Read the history of Wallonia and the Ardennes →A local guide tells you in half an hour what no sign at the site will ever explain. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 18 activities in Bruselas. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Three are below so you get the idea: tap any of them and they all open.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Mons owes its name to a hill —from the Latin 'mons', mount— and its origin to a saint. In the seventh century, in the middle of the Merovingian period, a noblewoman called Waudru (Waltrude in its Latinised form), wife of a lord of the region and mother of several children who were also venerated as saints, founded a religious community on this hill. Around that monastery and the relics of Waudru, who became the patron saint, a settlement began to grow.
The site had advantages: a hill in the middle of a region of plains and marshy ground, easy to defend and visible from far off. Devotion to Saint Waudru drew pilgrims, and the monastery's protection provided safety. Little by little, the cluster of houses packed onto the slope became a town, and the town a city, which would always keep the figure of its founding saint at its heart. To this day the great collegiate church of Sainte-Waudru holds her relics, and the Doudou festival, with the procession of the golden coach, revolves around her: thirteen hundred years later, the saint of the hill is still the soul of Mons.
In the following centuries, Mons grew in importance until it became the capital of the county of Hainaut, one of the feudal principalities that fragmented the map of what are now Belgium and northern France. As the county capital, the city acquired walls, institutions and a castle at the top of the hill —where the belfry stands today— and became a place of some weight, seat of the power of the counts of Hainaut and a crossroads of the region.
Through the Middle Ages, Mons flourished as capital of the county of Hainaut, a prosperous territory ruled by a dynasty of counts who, through marriages and inheritances, became related to the great houses of Europe and at times joined Hainaut with Holland and Zeeland. The city, seat of the court and of the county administration, benefited from that status: churches were built, the great Gothic town hall that still presides over the Grand-Place went up, and from the fifteenth century the building of the imposing collegiate church of Sainte-Waudru was undertaken, in the elegant Brabantine Gothic style.
Like so many territories in the region, Hainaut —and Mons with it— ended up absorbed by the rising power of the dukes of Burgundy in the fifteenth century, and then, by inheritance, passed to the House of Austria and to the Spanish branch of the Habsburgs, becoming part of the Low Countries. Under these sovereigns, Mons remained an important city of the Southern Netherlands, with its religious life, its guilds and its trade.
From that golden age come its great monuments and also its traditions. The Ducasse —the Doudou—, with its procession of the relics of Saint Waudru and its fight between St George and the dragon (the Lumeçon), has its roots in medieval devotions and civic festivals, and it has come down to our own day, transformed along the way. But the strategic position of Mons, in a region on the route between France and the Low Countries, was going to make it, like so many towns in the area, a military target and a recurring battlefield.
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Mons lived to the rhythm of the wars that ravaged the Southern Netherlands. Its position on the French border and its strategic value made it a much-coveted stronghold, fortified and besieged again and again. During the Eighty Years' War, in the struggles of the provinces against the Spanish crown, Mons was the scene of episodes such as the brief capture of the city by the rebels in 1572, followed by a hard siege and reprisals.
Later, the wars of Louis XIV brought the French armies to the region: Mons was besieged and taken by France, its fortifications were modernised by the military engineers of the day, and the city changed hands among the French, Spanish, Dutch and Austrians according to the treaties that ended each conflict. In 1691, a famous siege led by the French put Mons back at the centre of European politics. Every war left destruction, rebuilding and new walls.
That military past gave Mons a belt of fortifications which, as in other cities, was eventually dismantled in more peaceful times to allow urban growth. But the city's calling as a strategic crossroads did not disappear: in the twentieth century Mons would again be on the front line of the two world wars, and today, paradoxically, it hosts nearby the main military headquarters of the Atlantic Alliance in Europe. The hill of Saint Waudru has never entirely stopped being a coveted position.
The nineteenth century transformed the Mons region. Under its soil and that of the neighbouring districts lay one of the largest coal basins in Europe, and mining turned the Borinage —the mining area west of the city— into a landscape of pits, slag heaps and workers' quarters, with a large working class and an extremely hard life. Mons was the administrative capital of that industrial and mining basin, the engine of the Walloon economy but also the scene of great working-class poverty.
In that mining Borinage there lived, between 1878 and 1880, a young Dutchman who had arrived as an evangelical preacher to serve the miners: Vincent van Gogh. Moved to the core by the misery and the dignity of those men and women, Van Gogh shared their conditions, drew their faces and their labour and, in the middle of a deep personal crisis, took the decision that would change the history of art: to give up preaching and become a painter. His Borinage years were the humble, painful origin of his vocation, and the house where he lived in Cuesmes, on the outskirts of Mons, is preserved today as a place of memory.
The twentieth century also brought wars. In August 1914, in the opening moves of the First World War, the battle of Mons was the first clash between the British Army (the British Expeditionary Force, BEF) and the Germans in the war: the British held and then pulled back in a hard retreat. Four years later, closing the circle symbolically, Mons was liberated by Canadian troops on 11 November 1918, the very day of the armistice that ended the war. The city keeps memorials to those events, and it again suffered occupation and fighting in the Second World War.
The second half of the twentieth century was hard on the region: the closing of the coal mines, from the 1950s and 1960s onwards, plunged the Borinage and the whole basin into a long crisis of deindustrialisation, with unemployment and reconversion. Mons, capital of the province of Hainaut, had to reinvent itself, betting on services, administration, the university and, decisively, culture.
The turning point came in 2015, when Mons was named European Capital of Culture. That year transformed the city: museums were renovated and created (the BAM fine arts museum, the Doudou Museum, the fascinating Mundaneum —that 'Google on paper' dreamed up at the start of the twentieth century by Paul Otlet and the Nobel Peace laureate Henri La Fontaine—), the station and the public spaces were redeveloped, and Mons projected itself to the world as a cultured, creative city. In the surrounding area, former mining complexes such as Grand-Hornu and Bois-du-Luc, recognised by Unesco, were reborn as centres of art and industrial memory.
Today's Mons, with close to 95,000 inhabitants, is a city of contrasts that make it unusual. It keeps its old town crowned by the only Baroque belfry in Belgium, a Unesco World Heritage Site, and every year it celebrates its ancient, hugely popular Doudou, also Intangible Cultural Heritage. It is a university city and a young one; nearby it hosts SHAPE, NATO's military headquarters in Europe, with its international community; and it holds the memory of Van Gogh, of coal and of the wars. From the hill of Saint Waudru to the European Capital of Culture, Mons has managed to turn its very long and eventful history into a living, proud cultural identity.
