Zeebrugge

Beautiful Bruges
Waffles and chocolates
Lace and ceramics

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Zeebrugge/Bruges

The charming medieval city

Crowds tend to overwhelm Bruges nowadays – its reputation as a perfectly preserved medieval city has made it the most popular tourist destination in Belgium – but you’d be mad to come to Flanders.
With an MSC Northern Europe cruise and miss it: Bruges’ museums hold some of the country’s finest collections of Flemish art, and its intimate, winding streets, woven around a skein of narrow canals and lined with gorgeous ancient buildings, live up to even the most inflated tourist hype.

When you step ashore from your MSC cruise, the obvious start to an exploration of the city is the two principal squares: the Markt, overlooked by the mighty belfry, and the Burg, flanked by the city’s most impressive architectural ensemble. Almost within shouting distance are the three main museums, among which the Groeninge offers a wonderful sample of early Flemish art.

Another short hop brings you to St-Janshospitaal and the important paintings of the fifteenth-century artist Hans Memling, as well as Bruges’ most impressive churches, the Onze Lieve Vrouwekerk and St-Salvatorskathedraal. Further afield, the gentle canals and maze-like cobbled streets of eastern Bruges – stretching out from Jan van Eyckplein – are extraordinarily pretty.

The most characteristic architectural feature is the crow-step gable, popular from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century and revived by the restorers of the 1880s, but there are also expansive Georgian-style mansions and humble, homely cottages.

Time and again the eye is surprised by the sober and subtle variety of the cityscape, featuring everything from intimate arched doorways and bendy tiled roofs to wonky chimneys and a bevy of discreet shrines and miniature statues.

Must see places in Zeebrugge

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    Belgium

    Discovering the Flemish culture
    Discovering the Flemish culture

    A federal country with three official languages and an ongoing rivalry between its two main groups – Dutch-speaking Flemish and French-speaking Walloons – Belgium’s dull reputation is definitely misleading.
    A cruise to Belgium will show you lively and cultured cities in the predominantly urban north, beautiful forests and rugged hills in the south. A holiday to Belgium is a pleasure: factor in the Belgians’ enthusiasm for beer and fine cuisine, and all the ingredients for a truly memorable trip are in place. With Europe’s finest cliff-top city, neighbouring Luxembourg certainly does its bit too.

    Roughly in the middle of Belgium lies the capital, Brussels, the heart of the EU and a genuinely vibrant and multicultural city. North of here stretch the flat landscapes of Flemish Belgium, whose main city, Antwerp, is a bustling old port with doses of fine art, cutting-edge fashion, and twice as many bars as Amsterdam.

    Further west, also in the Flemish zone, are the charismatic cities of Bruges and Ghent, each with a stunning concentration of medieval architecture. To the south of Brussels, Belgium’s most scenic region, the Ardennes in Wallonia, has deep, wooded valleys, high elevations and dark caverns, with the town of Namur the obvious gateway.