🇧🇪 Belgium · The coast and West Flanders
Ypres is a name that in much of the world is spoken with respect. This small, pretty Flemish city, with its great square and its majestic Cloth Hall, looks at first sight like one more of the beautiful historic towns of Flanders. But almost everything you see is a meticulous reconstruction: between 1914 and 1918, Ypres was wiped off the map by four years of fighting. Here, in what was called the Ypres Salient, hundreds of thousands of soldiers of dozens of nationalities lost their lives in some of the most appalling battles of the First World War.
Today Ypres is, above all, a place of remembrance. Inside the rebuilt Cloth Hall beats the In Flanders Fields museum, one of the best museums in the world about the Great War, which tells the story of the conflict through human experience and with a commitment to peace. Every night, under the Menin Gate —the great arch that remembers the missing with no known grave— the Last Post is sounded, a tribute repeated without a break for almost a century. And across the surrounding fields stretch immaculate cemeteries, craters, trenches and the fields of red poppies that became the symbol of remembrance.
This guide covers Ypres with the sobriety the place deserves: what to see in the rebuilt city, how to visit the In Flanders Fields museum, what the Last Post is and what time it takes place, and how to tour the main memorial sites of the Salient, such as Tyne Cot cemetery. This is not just another destination: it is a journey into the memory of a European tragedy, treated with the seriousness and respect it demands, and also a moving record of reconstruction and of a longing for peace.
In the Middle Ages Ypres was one of the richest and most populous cities in Flanders, a power in the woollen textile industry alongside Bruges and Ghent, as its enormous thirteenth-century Cloth Hall shows. After centuries of decline, its name was carved into history for ever in the First World War: between 1914 and 1918 four great battles were fought around it (including Passchendaele in 1917), on a front that barely moved at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dead, and in which poison gas was used on a large scale for the first time (hence the term 'yperite' for mustard gas). The city was completely destroyed and was rebuilt stone by stone over the following decades. All of that, treated with the sobriety it deserves, 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.
Read the history of The coast and West Flanders →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
It is hard to imagine today, but in the Middle Ages Ypres was one of the richest and most populous cities in northern Europe. Along with Bruges and Ghent it formed the powerful trio of Flemish textile cities, whose prosperity rested on the wool industry: Ypres cloth, woven from wool imported from England, was sold in markets all over the continent. It is reckoned that at its peak, around the thirteenth century, the city may have reached something like 40,000 inhabitants, an enormous figure for the time.
The symbol of that wealth is the colossal Cloth Hall (Lakenhalle), built in the thirteenth century: one of the largest Gothic civil buildings in Europe, a giant market and warehouse for cloth with a tall belfry. Its sheer scale speaks of the power of the merchants and the textile guilds that governed the city. Ypres, like its Flemish sisters, was also a hotbed of social tension between the rich middle class and the weavers, and it took part in the struggles of the Flemish cities against the kings of France, as at the Battle of the Golden Spurs (1302).
But the glory did not last. From the fourteenth century, a combination of epidemics (the Black Death), wars, competition from rural and English textile production and the decline of trade gradually sank Ypres. Its population collapsed, the city shrank and for centuries it was a provincial stronghold, fought over by the armies that roamed Flanders. The great Cloth Hall remained as an oversized memory of lost splendour. And so, as a quiet provincial town, it would have carried on had it not been for the catastrophe awaiting it in the twentieth century.
In August 1914 the First World War broke out and the German army invaded Belgium, a neutral country, in order to attack France. After the so-called 'race to the sea', in which both sides tried to outflank each other towards the coast, the Western Front settled in the autumn of 1914 into a line of trenches running from the North Sea to Switzerland. And in Flanders, that line stopped right in front of Ypres.
The Allies —British, French and Belgian— managed to halt the German advance at the First Battle of Ypres (October-November 1914), but at the cost of thousands of lives. The city was left inside a salient: an arc of the front pushing into the German lines and therefore surrounded by the enemy on three of its four sides. That geography would make Ypres and its surroundings one of the deadliest areas of the whole war over the following four years, pounded by artillery from several directions.
The civilian population fled, and Ypres became a city of ruins and soldiers. For the troops of the British Empire —British, but also Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Indians, South Africans— 'Wipers', as they pronounced the name, became a byword for mud, shelling and death. The Ypres Salient was to be the scene of some of the most appalling pages of the twentieth century.
The Ypres Salient was burned into memory for two terrible reasons. The first was the large-scale debut of the chemical weapon. On 22 April 1915, at the Second Battle of Ypres, the German army released clouds of chlorine gas against the Allied lines near Langemark, in one of the first mass uses of poison gas in the history of warfare. Later, mustard gas would be used in the area, which is why it came to be known as 'yperite', in reference to Ypres. The gas caused a horrific death and spread panic, and it opened a form of warfare that appalled the world.
The second was Passchendaele. Between July and November 1917, the Third Battle of Ypres —known by the name of the village of Passchendaele (Passendale)— sought to break the German lines towards the coast. It was fought in an autumn of relentless rain which, added to the destruction of the drainage system by shelling, turned the ground into a quagmire in which men, horses and guns sank and drowned. In exchange for an advance of barely a few kilometres, hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides were killed, wounded or went missing. For whole generations, Passchendaele became the very symbol of the futility and horror of trench warfare.
Over the four years of fighting, the city of Ypres itself was systematically pounded by artillery until it was reduced to rubble: the great Cloth Hall, the cathedral and practically every house were destroyed. When the war ended in November 1918, where a city had stood almost nothing was left standing. Ypres was a desert of ruins. It was even proposed that it be left that way, as a permanent memorial to the destruction.
Faced with the idea of keeping the ruins as a monument —argued for above all by some in Britain— the people of Ypres who returned after the war decided to rebuild their city. And they did it in an extraordinary way: instead of putting up a modern city, they chose to rebuild the old town stone by stone, as faithfully as possible to how it had been before 1914. Through the 1920s, 1930s and beyond, the Cloth Hall, St Martin's cathedral and the façades of the Grote Markt were reborn from old plans and photographs, in one of the greatest heritage reconstruction efforts of the twentieth century. That is why the 'medieval' Ypres the visitor admires today is in fact, for the most part, a twentieth-century resurrection.
The other great task was to honour the dead. The number of fallen was so colossal, and so many bodies had been so torn apart or buried in the mud, that tens of thousands of soldiers had no known grave. To remember them, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission built imposing memorials. The most famous is the Menin Gate, inaugurated in 1927 at the exit through which so many soldiers marched to the front: almost 55,000 names of the missing with no grave are engraved on its walls, and even then not all of them fitted. The rest were inscribed on the wall at Tyne Cot, the largest Commonwealth cemetery in the world, near Passchendaele.
And a tradition was born that endures. Since 1928, every night at 20:00, under the Menin Gate, buglers from the Ypres fire brigade sound the Last Post, the military call for the fallen, in tribute to the dead. It was interrupted only during the German occupation in the Second World War —and it resumed on the very night of the liberation in 1944, while fighting was still going on in the outskirts. That simple act, repeated thousands of times, is the gesture with which a small Flemish town upholds, generation after generation, the memory of a European tragedy.
Today's Ypres, with close to 35,000 inhabitants, has turned its tragedy into a message. The city now defines itself as a 'city of peace': it does not glorify war or military heroism, but remembers the suffering of victims on all sides and works for reconciliation. The In Flanders Fields museum, housed in the rebuilt Cloth Hall, tells the story of the conflict through human experience —soldiers, nurses, civilians from one trench and the other— and with a clear pacifist purpose.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of visitors come to Ypres from all over the world, and especially from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, to honour ancestors who fell in the Salient. Many come to look for a great-grandfather's name on the Menin Gate or a grave in one of the immaculately kept cemeteries scattered across the countryside. The centenary of the war, between 2014 and 2018, brought heads of state and crowds to the city's ceremonies.
The fields around Ypres, where the red poppies of McCrae's poem bloom again each spring, still yield, almost a century on, the 'iron harvest': shells, bullets and debris that farmers dig up every season, and sometimes also the bodies of soldiers finally identified and buried with honours. Ypres is, then, a place where the past never quite becomes the past, and where a community has made the memory of death a daily task and a plea for peace. Few small towns in Europe carry such a heavy history, or bear it with such dignity.