A capital that hides its good half behind a dull first impression

Brussels is the capital of Belgium and the seat of the European Union’s main institutions — about 1.2 million people spread across nineteen separate communes, each with its own council, its own rules and, in places, its own opening hours. It sits in the flat middle of the country on the river Senne, which you will not see: it was vaulted over in the 1860s and 70s to end the cholera outbreaks, and the boulevards were built on top of it. Everything here is signed twice, in French and in Dutch.

The city began as a settlement in the marshes around the year 979 and grew rich as a Brabant cloth and trading town. In 1695 a French bombardment flattened the centre; the guild houses on the Grand-Place were rebuilt within a few years, which is why a medieval market square looks uniformly late-seventeenth-century. Brussels became the capital of an independent Belgium in 1830 and was rebuilt on a monumental scale under Leopold II. Art Nouveau began here, with Victor Horta’s Hôtel Tassel in 1893. The Atomium went up for the 1958 World’s Fair and was only meant to stand for six months.

It is known for beer — lambic and gueuze are brewed nowhere else on earth — for chocolate, frites and waffles; for comics, since Tintin and the Smurfs are both from here and murals of them are painted across the centre; for Art Nouveau; and for the Grand-Place, on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1998. It is also known, unfairly, as dull. That one we take up at the bottom of this page.