BRUSSELS · BELGIUM
Gold leaf, chocolate, and very good beer.
The gilded Grand-Place and the back-street chocolate houses, lambic cafes and waffle irons, comic-strip walls and Art Nouveau townhouses. Plus the fairytale day trips to Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp.
Born in Brussels
Three things the city gave the world.
You can buy chocolate, beer and waffles anywhere now. All three were perfected here, and they still taste better a few streets from where they started.
Invented 1912
The Filled Praline
The praline, the filled Belgian chocolate, was created in 1912 by Jean Neuhaus in the glass-roofed Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert, a few minutes from the Grand-Place. Brussels has been the capital of fine chocolate ever since, and the tasting walks still start at the original counters.
- 1 Choco-Story Brussels: Chocolate Museum Entrance with Tasting
- 2 Hungry Mary’s Famous Beer and Chocolate Tour in Brussels
- 3 Brussels: 2.5-Hour Chocolate Museum Visit with Workshop
Wild fermentation
Lambic & Gueuze
Lambic is the last beer still brewed by the wild yeast drifting in on the night air, and it can only be made in the Senne valley that Brussels sits in. The old gueuze cafes pour it flat and bone-dry from dusty bottles, the way the city has for a few hundred years.
- 1 Belgian Beer Tasting in Brussels
- 2 Brussels 2.5-Hour Belgian Beer Tasting Experience
- 3 Marc’s Brussels Beer Tasting Tour
The original
The Brussels Waffle
Light, rectangular and dusted with icing sugar, the Brussels waffle is a different thing entirely from the dense, caramelised Liege kind, and it carries this city in its name. Workshops near the centre hand you the batter and the hot iron and let you lift your own off the heat.
- 1 Brussels: Historical Walking Tour with Chocolate & Waffle Tasting
- 2 Brussels Walking and Tasting Tour (Beers,Chocolates&Fries/Waffle)
- 3 Brussels: Historical Tour with Chocolate & Waffle Tasting
Start here
The one ticket nearly everyone books.
More visitors build a first day in Brussels around this than anything else on the list.
The classics
Brussels’ Most Popular Tours
The Atomium, the fairytale run to Bruges and Ghent, the chocolate-and-beer walks and the museum passes. The days most people come to Brussels for.
Where to begin
The handful of days a Brussels trip is built around.
The chocolate houses, the beer cafes, the gilded square, the great museums and the medieval towns down the line. The trips worth planning around, and the best way to do each.
The big day trip
Bruges, Ghent, or both in a day?
The two medieval canal cities are under an hour from Brussels, and the hardest call is whether to give a whole day to one or try to fit in both. Three ways to do it, depending on how much you want to slow down.
The chocolate capital
A praline on every corner.
Pierre Marcolini, Neuhaus, Mary, Wittamer, and a hundred smaller ateliers tempering by hand. The tasting walks weave between the grand houses and the back-street workshops; the hands-on classes put you behind the marble slab. Most start within sight of the Grand-Place.
Read the guide: the best chocolate experiences in Brussels →1,500 beers
A beer culture the UN protects.
Belgian beer is on UNESCO’s heritage list, and Brussels is its capital: Trappist ales poured to a monks’ recipe, fruit lambics, and the bone-dry gueuze that can only ferment in this valley. The tastings run from wood-panelled cafes to the working breweries on the edge of town.
See the beer tastings & brewery tours →The Grand-Place
The most beautiful square in Europe.
Victor Hugo’s words, not ours. A UNESCO square ringed by gilded guildhalls, the openwork spire of the Town Hall and the King’s House, lit gold after dark and carpeted end to end with flowers every other August. Every walking tour begins here, and so should you.
Brussels walking tours →Art Nouveau
The city that drew the first Art Nouveau line.
In 1893 Victor Horta finished the Hotel Tassel here and a whole movement followed him: whiplash ironwork, stained glass and glass-roofed light wells, spread across the townhouses of Saint-Gilles and Ixelles. Four of Horta’s houses are UNESCO-listed, and guided walks get you inside the ones still open to visitors.
See the Art Nouveau tours →The Ninth Art
Tintin came from here. So did the Smurfs.
Belgium turned the comic strip into a national art form, and Brussels wears it on its walls: more than fifty painted murals of Tintin, Lucky Luke and the rest, a comic museum inside a Horta-built warehouse, and street-art walks that read the city like a page.
Comic-strip & street-art walks →By place
The city, and the towns down the line.
Brussels for the square, the chocolate and the museums. Bruges and Ghent for the canals. Antwerp for Rubens and fashion. Plus Amsterdam, Luxembourg and the Ardennes, all an easy train or coach ride away.
By appetite
Pick how to spend the afternoon.
Chocolate if you have a sweet tooth, beer if you don’t. Walk the highlights, ride the hop-on bus, cycle the back streets, or give the evening to the museums.
Plan it
Three perfect days.
First time in Brussels? Here is a long weekend that hits the square, the sugar and the fairytale towns without a wasted hour.
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