The Most Beautiful Square in the World
Victor Hugo called the Grand-Place the most beautiful square in the world, and after standing in its center at dusk while the guild houses turn gold under floodlights, you will have a hard time arguing with him. The square is a contained explosion of Baroque excess — carved stone dripping with gilded ornamentation, each facade competing with its neighbor for the most elaborate pediment, the most intricate bas-relief, the most absurdly decorated roofline. The Hôtel de Ville anchors the southwest corner with its 96-meter Gothic spire, the one structure that survived what came next.
In August 1695, Louis XIV ordered Marshal de Villeroy to bombard Brussels. French artillery fired on the city for two days straight. The Grand-Place was reduced to rubble. Every guild house, every merchant hall, every tavern around the square — gone. Only the town hall's stone walls held. What the Sun King did not anticipate was the response. The guilds — bakers, brewers, tailors, boatmen — pooled their money and rebuilt the entire square in three years. They did not rebuild modestly. They rebuilt with deliberate, furious extravagance, piling on more gold leaf, more sculpture, more ornamentation than the originals had ever carried. The Grand-Place as you see it today is not a medieval square. It is a monument to collective stubbornness, a city telling a king that his cannons accomplished nothing.
The Capital Nobody Asked For
Belgium exists because the great powers of 1830 needed a buffer state between France and the Netherlands, and Brussels became its capital largely by geographic default. The country was carved out of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands after a revolution that started, improbably, at an opera performance — the audience at La Monnaie theater walked out into the streets and started a revolt. The great powers recognized the new nation within months, installed a German prince as king, and drew borders that enclosed two populations who did not particularly want to share a country.
The French-speaking Walloons in the south and the Dutch-speaking Flemish in the north have spent the last two centuries in a slow-motion argument about language, money, and identity. Brussels sits at the geographic fault line, officially bilingual in a country where bilingualism is more aspiration than reality. Every street sign is in two languages. Every government ministry is duplicated. The country has six parliaments for eleven million people. You will notice this in small ways — the Dutch name on one side of a building, the French on the other, the slight tension in a waiter's pause when you open with the wrong language. Brussels is a city whose identity crisis is not a bug but a founding condition.
The Quiet Capital of a Continent
Walk east from the old city center and the architecture changes abruptly. The narrow medieval streets give way to broad avenues lined with glass-and-steel office buildings, each one flying a circle of gold stars on blue. This is the Quartier Européen — the European Quarter — where the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, and a constellation of agencies, lobbying firms, and policy shops run the bureaucratic machinery of 450 million people. NATO headquarters sits northeast in Haren. The European Parliament's hemicycle rises like a glass whale near Luxembourg station.
What this means for the city you actually experience: a disproportionate number of excellent restaurants for a city this size, because Brussels feeds a rotating population of diplomats, lobbyists, and Eurocrats on expense accounts. Rents in the eastern neighborhoods are higher than the local economy alone would justify. The bars around Place du Luxembourg fill with multilingual twenty-somethings on Thursday evenings — the unofficial start of the EU weekend, since many staffers commute home to other countries on Friday. Brussels is the rare capital that runs something larger than its own country, and the scale mismatch gives the city a strange doubled quality — provincial and cosmopolitan at once, a medium-sized city doing a world-capital's job.
Art Nouveau and Its Destruction
Victor Horta built the first true Art Nouveau building in Brussels in 1893 — the Hôtel Tassel on Rue Paul-Émile Janson, a private home whose sinuous iron columns and organic staircase broke every rule of the architecture that came before it. Over the next two decades, Brussels became the world capital of the style. Horta, Paul Hankar, Henry van de Velde, and their contemporaries filled the city with buildings that treated iron and glass as materials for curves rather than right angles, that wove vegetal motifs into facades and stairwells and doorknobs. The Horta Museum — his own home and studio on Rue Américaine — is still the single best place in the world to understand what Art Nouveau was trying to do: dissolve the boundary between structure and decoration, make the bones of a building beautiful.
Then Brussels tore most of it down. In the 1960s and 1970s, a wave of speculative development swept the city. Developers demolished Art Nouveau townhouses by the block to put up office towers and parking garages. The destruction was so systematic, so gratuitous, that urban planners coined a word for it: Brusselization. The term entered the international vocabulary of architecture as a synonym for the thoughtless demolition of a historic urban fabric. The Maison du Peuple — Horta's masterpiece, a soaring iron-and-glass people's palace built for the Belgian Workers' Party — was torn down in 1965 despite international protest. What remains is extraordinary. The Old England building on Rue Montagne de la Cour, now the Musical Instrument Museum, still lifts its black iron-and-glass facade above the Mont des Arts. Dozens of private homes survive in the Ixelles and Saint-Gilles neighborhoods. But you walk those streets knowing that what you see is a fraction of what there was, and that the city itself destroyed the rest.
The Comic Strip Capital
Belgium produces more comic strips per capita than any country on earth, and Brussels treats the medium with the seriousness other capitals reserve for opera. Hergé created Tintin here in 1929 — a boy reporter whose adventures sold 250 million copies and whose clear-line drawing style influenced two generations of European artists. Peyo invented the Smurfs in a Brussels studio. Morris drew Lucky Luke. The tradition runs so deep that Belgium calls comics the Ninth Art and means it without irony.
You encounter this everywhere. The Comic Strip Route is a trail of more than fifty building-sized murals painted across the city — Tintin running down a fire escape on Rue de l'Étuve, Lucky Luke drawing his pistol on a wall near Gare du Midi, the Smurfs cascading down a facade in the Marolles. The Belgian Comic Strip Center, housed in a Horta-designed department store on Rue des Sables, traces the tradition from Tintin through the French-language bande dessinée to contemporary graphic novels. The building alone is worth the visit — one of Horta's surviving commercial works, its iron skeleton and glass roof flooding the gallery floors with daylight. The comics are displayed as art, which in Belgium they are.
The Food
Brussels eats better than its reputation suggests, and its reputation is already good. Moules-frites is the civic dish — a black pot of mussels steamed in white wine and celery, served with a cone of twice-fried potatoes that are crisper than anything you have had before. The frites matter. Belgian frites are fried once at a lower temperature to cook through, then fried again at high heat to seal the crust. The result is a different object from a French fry — shatteringly crisp outside, fluffy inside, served in a paper cone with mayonnaise, not ketchup.
The waffle situation requires clarification. The Brussels waffle is the rectangular, light, crisp one — a yeast batter pressed in a deep grid, served plain or with powdered sugar. The Liège waffle is the dense, chewy, irregularly shaped one — a brioche dough studded with pearl sugar that caramelizes against the iron. They are not the same food. Tourist stands near the Grand-Place sell both, piled with Nutella and strawberries and whipped cream; the better versions come from neighborhood bakeries that sell them plain, which is how they are meant to be eaten.
Then there is the beer. Belgium has more distinct beer styles than any country in the world — lambics spontaneously fermented by wild yeast in the Senne Valley, Trappist ales brewed by monks in working monasteries, saisons brewed for farmworkers, gueuze blended from aged lambics. The Delirium Café near the Grand-Place stocks more than 2,000 beers and holds a Guinness record for it, but the more interesting drinking happens at smaller bars — Moeder Lambic on Place Fontainas, À la Mort Subite on Rue Montagne aux Herbes Potagères (a cafe that gave its name to a beer style), Cantillon Brewery in Anderlecht where you can watch lambic ferment in open wooden vats the way it has for a century.
A City That Survives Itself
Brussels is the most underestimated capital in Europe. It has been invaded by the Spanish, the Austrians, the French, and the Germans. It was bombarded by Louis XIV and rebuilt out of spite. It was handed the administrative machinery of a continent it did not design and made it work. It invented an entire architectural movement and then demolished most of it, earning a word in the dictionary for its trouble. It was split down the middle by a language border that runs through its schools, its hospitals, and its street signs. And through all of this, it kept the Grand-Place, kept the frites, kept the beer, kept a comic-strip tradition that treats drawings as high art, and kept a stubborn, self-deprecating refusal to take itself as seriously as its job title demands. You come to Brussels expecting a bureaucratic gray zone and find one of the most distinctive, best-fed, quietly beautiful cities in Europe. It has been hiding in plain sight the whole time.