🇧🇪 Belgium · Brussels and Brabant
Waterloo is one of those names that go beyond geography: in many languages, 'to meet your Waterloo' means to suffer final defeat. And it was in these rolling fields south of Brussels, on 18 June 1815, that one of the most decisive battles in European history was fought, the one that ended the Empire of Napoleon Bonaparte and more than two decades of wars that had shaken the whole continent.
Today that battlefield is a great place of remembrance dominated by the Lion's Mound (the Butte du Lion), a 40-metre artificial hill crowned by an enormous iron lion, from whose top you take in the whole scene of the fighting. At its foot, a modern underground museum, a painted circular panorama and historic farms such as Hougoumont reconstruct minute by minute that bloody day that changed the fate of Europe.
This guide covers the essentials of Waterloo with a practical eye: the Memorial 1815 and its museum, the climb up the Lion's Mound, the fortified farm of Hougoumont, the Wellington Museum and Napoleon's last headquarters. A half-day or full-day trip from Brussels, ideal for history lovers, but also for anyone who wants to understand why this small Belgian town marked a before and after.
The name Waterloo was carved into history on 18 June 1815. After escaping his exile on the island of Elba and regaining power in France during the episode known as the Hundred Days, Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte faced a European coalition determined to finish him off. In the fields south of Brussels, his army clashed with the Anglo-allied forces commanded by the Duke of Wellington and with Marshal Blücher's Prussian army. After a day of fierce fighting around farms such as Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte, the arrival of the Prussians on the French right flank tipped the balance and caused the collapse of the Napoleonic army. The defeat was total: Napoleon abdicated for the second time a few days later and was exiled to the remote island of Saint Helena, in the South Atlantic, where he died in 1821. The battle of Waterloo closed the cycle of the Napoleonic wars and opened a long period of relative balance in Europe, designed at the Congress of Vienna. 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.
Read the history of Brussels and Brabant →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
To understand Waterloo you have to go back to 1814. After more than a decade of wars that had bloodied the whole of Europe, the allied powers (the United Kingdom, Russia, Austria, Prussia and others) had finally defeated Napoleon Bonaparte, forced him to abdicate and exiled him to the small island of Elba, off the Italian coast, leaving him the symbolic title of sovereign of the island. In France the Bourbon monarchy was restored under Louis XVIII. It looked like the end of the Napoleonic era.
But Napoleon did not accept it. On 26 February 1815 he escaped from Elba, landed in the south of France with a handful of loyal men and set off on a triumphal march towards Paris. The soldiers sent to stop him went over to his side the moment they saw him; the Napoleonic myth was still intact. On 20 March he entered Paris without a shot being fired, while Louis XVIII fled. So began the episode known as the Hundred Days, Napoleon's brief return to power.
The powers gathered at the Congress of Vienna reacted at once: they declared Napoleon an outlaw and mobilised their armies to finish him off once and for all. Napoleon knew his only chance was to strike fast, before the huge allied armies could concentrate. He decided to attack the two nearest forces, deployed in what is now Belgium: the Duke of Wellington's Anglo-allied army and Marshal Blücher's Prussian army, hoping to defeat them separately before they could join up. The setting for that decisive clash would be the fields south of Brussels.
Napoleon's offensive began on 15 June 1815, when his Army of the North crossed the border and entered what is now Belgian territory, trying to get between Wellington's forces and Blücher's to stop them joining up. The plan was bold and classically Napoleonic: divide and conquer.
On 16 June two battles were fought at the same time. At Ligny, Napoleon attacked Blücher's Prussian army and defeated it, though he failed to destroy it: the Prussians withdrew in good order, and Blücher himself, by then in his seventies, came close to dying under his horse. That detail would prove crucial. A few kilometres away, at the Quatre-Bras crossroads, Marshal Ney fought Wellington's troops with no decisive result. Napoleon believed the Prussians were out of the fight and detached a third of his army, under Marshal Grouchy, to pursue them and stop them coming back.
It was a miscalculation. Instead of withdrawing eastwards (towards his supply lines and away from Wellington), Blücher took the decision that would change history: to fall back northwards, parallel to Wellington, with the promise of coming to his aid. Grouchy, with his 30,000 men, lost contact with the Prussians and ended up manoeuvring far from the main fight. Meanwhile, Wellington pulled back and carefully chose his defensive position on a ridge near the village of Mont-Saint-Jean, south of Waterloo, ready to withstand Napoleon's attack as long as he had the guarantee that Blücher would come. He had it. The stage for the decisive battle was set.
The 18th of June 1815 dawned with the ground soaked by the previous night's torrential rain. Napoleon put back the start of the attack by a few hours to let the ground dry so he could manoeuvre his artillery, a delay that, according to many historians, would prove fatal, because it gave the Prussians time to close in. Facing each other were some 68,000 of Napoleon's men and some 68,000 of Wellington's (a mix of British, Dutch, Belgian, and troops from Hanover, Nassau and Brunswick), to whom the Prussians would be added decisively.
The fighting began close to midday with the French attack on the fortified farm of Hougoumont, on the allied right flank, which turned into a battle within the battle: its defenders held out all day despite ferocious assaults and the buildings burning. In the centre, waves of infantry and the famous French cavalry charges, led by Ney, broke again and again against the British infantry squares, which held at a terrible cost. The farm of La Haye Sainte, in the centre, fell to the French late in the day, putting Wellington in trouble.
But in mid-afternoon, on the French right flank, Blücher's Prussian columns began to appear, having marched painfully along muddy roads. Their arrival forced Napoleon to divert troops to hold them off around the village of Plancenoit. Towards seven in the evening, Napoleon played his last card: he threw in the elite of his army, the Imperial Guard, undefeated until then, in a final assault on the allied centre. It was thrown back. The cry of 'The Guard is falling back!' ran along the French lines and set off panic. With the Prussians pushing on one flank and Wellington ordering a general advance, the French army fell apart in a chaotic rout. As night fell, Wellington and Blücher met on the field covered with bodies: the battle is reckoned to have left close to 50,000 dead and wounded on both sides.
The defeat at Waterloo was total and final. Napoleon fled back to Paris, where he tried in vain to hold on to power. On 22 June 1815, barely four days after the battle, he abdicated for the second time. This time there would be no clemency and no Mediterranean island: the allies exiled him to Saint Helena, a remote, windswept British island lost in the South Atlantic, thousands of kilometres from Europe, from which escape would be impossible. There, watched and isolated, he wrote his memoirs and died on 5 May 1821, at the age of 51. An era ended with him.
Waterloo closed the cycle of Napoleonic and revolutionary wars that had ravaged Europe for almost a quarter of a century. The new map and the new balance of power were designed by the Congress of Vienna, which sought to restore the monarchies and create a system that would prevent new large-scale wars. That order, with its lights and shadows, gave Europe a period of relative peace among the great powers that would last, with exceptions, for decades. The United Kingdom emerged as the dominant power, and Prussia strengthened its role in Germany.
The name Waterloo entered legend. For the English-speaking world it was Wellington's great victory, and it made him a national hero; in France it remained the glorious, tragic symbol of the end of the imperial dream. The expression 'to meet your Waterloo' became universal as a synonym for final defeat. Monuments from all sides were raised on the battlefield and, between 1823 and 1826, the colossal Lion's Mound. Two hundred years on, with its modern Memorial opened for the bicentenary in 2015, Waterloo still draws visitors from all over the world who want to walk the fields where the fate of Europe was decided in a single day.