Ostend is Belgium's seaside. In a country with just 67 kilometres of coastline, this West Flanders city is the undisputed capital of the coast: a long beach of fine sand, a seafront promenade with the air of a grand resort, a fishing harbour and a history of kings, artists and holidaymakers who named it 'the queen of seaside resorts' of the North Sea. It is where generations of Belgians come for fresh air, mussels and grey shrimp, and the feel of the north wind on their faces.
But Ostend is not just a beach. It is the city of the painter James Ensor, one of the great forerunners of modern art, whose house-museum you can visit. It is a working port, with its fish market, its Mercator training ship and its Napoleonic forts. It has a street art and festival scene that has given it a creative, contemporary feel, and a good art museum, Mu.ZEE. And it is the gateway to the coast tram, the tramway that runs the length of the Belgian coast right by the sea, one of the most unusual rides in Europe.
This guide explores Ostend with a practical, warm eye: the beach and the seafront promenade, the harbour area and the Mercator, Ensor's house and Mu.ZEE, the forts, the seafood and how to make the most of the Kusttram to discover the rest of the coast. Whether you are coming for a day from Bruges or staying several days to breathe in the North Sea, Ostend has that charm, somewhere between elegant and salty, of the old seaside towns of the north.
Ostend began as a modest fishing village in the Middle Ages, on a strip of dunes facing the North Sea, and owes its name ('east end') to its position on the island of Testerep. Its big leap came in the 16th and 17th centuries, when it became a key stronghold: during the Eighty Years' War it endured one of the longest and bloodiest sieges in history (1601-1604). In the 18th century it was the port of the Ostend Company, which traded with Asia. But its golden age came in the 19th century, when King Leopold I and above all Leopold II turned it into a fashionable royal seaside resort, with galleries, a racecourse and grand hotels: 'the queen of seaside resorts'. The two world wars and the bombing hit it hard, and much of the city was rebuilt afterwards. All of it, from the siege to Ensor and from the kings to the present day, is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Flemish west, between the North Sea and the battlefields: Ostend, the queen of Belgian beaches, and Ypres, the martyr city of the First World War, epicentre of the memory of the trenches and the poppies of Flanders.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Ostend began as exactly what its name says: an 'east end'. In the Early Middle Ages, on a long ribbon of sand and dunes called the island of Testerep, facing the North Sea, stood two small fishing settlements: Westende ('west end') and Oostende ('east end'). The city grew out of the latter. The first documentary mentions date from the eleventh century, and in 1267 the count of Flanders granted it a charter giving it city rights, a sign that this community of fishermen and farmers was starting to matter.
Life on that edge between land and sea was hard and precarious. The sea was both the livelihood —herring and cod fishing— and a constant threat: North Sea storms and tides gnawed relentlessly at the dune ribbon, and several times old Ostend was partly swallowed by the water. In the fifteenth century the town had to be moved and rebuilt a little further inland, behind new dikes, to protect itself from a sea that threatened to devour it.
Even so, Ostend grew as a fishing and trading port of Flanders. Its strategic position on the coast, looking towards England and towards the North Sea routes, made it a coveted spot. Nobody could have imagined then that this modest village of nets and boats would be, centuries later, the scene of one of the most terrible sieges in European history.
At the end of the sixteenth century, the Low Countries were at war. The rebellion of the northern provinces against the Spanish crown —the Eighty Years' War— had turned Flanders into a battlefield, and Ostend, in the hands of the Protestant rebels and their English allies, became a key stronghold, a thorn in the side of Spanish Flanders. Surrounded by water, defended by modern fortifications and supplied by sea, the town looked impregnable.
In July 1601, the army of the archdukes Albert and Isabella, who governed the Spanish Netherlands, laid siege to Ostend. What was meant to be a quick campaign turned into a nightmare lasting more than three years. The siege of Ostend was one of the longest and bloodiest in history: the town, endlessly resupplied by sea, held out while the besiegers threw wave after wave of attacks at its defences. It was fought metre by metre, among trenches, mines and countermines, in a quagmire of sand, water and blood. Horrified contemporaries called it 'the new Troy'.
The Genoese general Ambrogio Spinola, leading the Spanish troops, finally forced the town to surrender on 22 September 1604, after a siege that, according to estimates of the time, cost tens of thousands of lives on both sides —the figures speak of between 60,000 and 100,000 dead. When it finally fell, Ostend was little more than a heap of ruins. The town returned to Spanish hands, and Flanders would remain Catholic and Spanish for a long time yet. Out of that flattened Ostend a new town had to be born, once again.
Rebuilt after the siege, Ostend gradually recovered its seafaring calling. Its great opportunity came in the eighteenth century. In 1722, under the rule of the Austrian Habsburgs —to whom the Southern Netherlands had passed after the War of the Spanish Succession— Emperor Charles VI granted a charter to the Ostend Company (Oostendse Compagnie), a trading venture meant to compete with the powerful Dutch and English East India companies in the lucrative trade with Asia.
From the port of Ostend, the company's ships sailed for India and China and came back loaded with tea, silk, porcelain and spices. For a few years the business flourished and turned Ostend into a prosperous, cosmopolitan international port. But success stirred the jealousy of the great maritime powers: diplomatic pressure from England and the United Provinces, which would not tolerate the competition, forced the emperor to suspend the company's activities in 1731, barely a decade after its founding, as part of a game of European alliances.
Although the venture was brief, it left Ostend the memory of an age of commercial splendour and reinforced its identity as a port open to the world. The town remained a contested maritime and military position, changing hands among Austrians, revolutionary and Napoleonic French —Fort Napoleon, ordered built around 1811, dates from this period— and, after Napoleon's fall, it became part first of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands and, from 1830, of newly independent Belgium.
The nineteenth century completely transformed Ostend. With the European fashion for sea bathing as a cure for one's health, and with the arrival of the railway that brought the coast closer to the cities, the old stronghold reinvented itself as an elegant seaside resort. And it had an exceptional patron: the Belgian monarchy. King Leopold I already frequented the town, but it was above all Leopold II, in the second half of the century, who made Ostend his favourite summer residence and the country's fashionable resort, 'the queen of the seaside resorts' (Koningin der Badsteden).
Under his impetus rose grand hotels, a casino (the Kursaal), a racecourse, stately villas and the elegant Royal Galleries (Koninklijke Gaanderijen), a covered promenade linking the royal residence with the baths. The aristocracy and upper middle class of half of Europe came to stroll the sea wall, to bet at the races and to take the waters. Ostend was living its Belle Époque, a time of luxury, fashion and refinement beside the North Sea.
In that cosmopolitan, bourgeois Ostend was born and raised the man who would make it immortal in art: James Ensor (1860-1949). The son of a family that ran a shop selling souvenirs, carnival masks and sea curiosities, Ensor barely left his home town, but from there he revolutionised painting. His grotesque masks, his skeletons, his unsettling atmospheres and his masterpiece 'Christ's Entry into Brussels' made him a forerunner of expressionism and surrealism. Alongside him, another painter of the town, Léon Spilliaert, portrayed like nobody else the melancholy solitude of the sea wall, the beach and the sea at night. Ostend was no longer only a resort: it was also a capital of modern art.
The twentieth century hit Ostend hard. During the First World War the town was under German occupation and its port became a base for submarines and destroyers used to harass Allied shipping in the English Channel. In 1918, the British navy launched the famous Zeebrugge and Ostend raids, risky operations to block the ports by sinking ships at the entrance to the channels. Ostend came out of those years battered.
The Second World War was even worse. Occupied by the Germans again, Ostend was built into the Atlantic Wall, the Third Reich's line of coastal fortifications, and suffered heavy Allied bombing that destroyed much of the old centre and the port. When the war ended, much of the elegant Ostend of the Belle Époque had disappeared under the rubble, and the town had to rebuild itself once more, as it had so many times in its history.
Post-war Ostend went back to being a beach destination, a fishing port and, for decades, the terminal of the ferries that crossed to England (Dover and Ramsgate), until those lines gradually disappeared. In recent decades, the town has reinvented itself by betting on culture: the Mu.ZEE museum, the recovery of the legacy of Ensor and Spilliaert, an ambitious street art festival (The Crystal Ship) that has covered its façades with murals, and a life of festivals and seafood cooking. Today Ostend, with close to 72,000 inhabitants, is still the capital of the Belgian coast: 'the queen of the seaside resorts' which, through sieges, kings, painters and wars, has always known how to be reborn facing the North Sea.
