🦢 The City That Fell Asleep

Bruges looks perfectly medieval for a melancholy reason. In the 15th and 16th centuries the Zwin estuary that linked the city to the sea silted up, strangling the trade that had made Bruges one of the richest cities in Europe. The money left, the cranes fell silent, and for three centuries Bruges was too poor to tear anything down or build anything new. That long sleep is exactly why its canals, guild houses and church towers survive intact today — the 19th-century writers who called it "Bruges-la-Morte" were unwittingly describing the best-preserved medieval city in Europe.

The swans you will see on the canals at Minnewater are there by decree. When the citizens of Bruges executed a hated administrator of Maximilian of Austria named Pieter Lanchals — whose family emblem was a long-necked white bird — Maximilian is said to have ordered the city to keep swans on its waters forever in his memory. More than five hundred years later, they are still gliding under the bridges.