Bruges in the morning, Ghent after lunch. Belgium is that small.
Which canal boat is worth the jetty queue in Bruges. What a chocolate bench in Brussels really costs. Whether Ypres works as a day trip or needs the night. Reviews of every tour you can book in Belgium.
A canal boat, the Atomium, a chocolate bench and the Salient.
The four bookings a first week in Belgium tends to hang off. What each one costs, and what the people who took it say.
01The Bruges morningSmall Group Boat Cruise and Guided Walking TourBoat and walking guide sold as one, which is how you get past the queue on the Rozenhoedkaai jetty.
02The Brussels landmarkAtomium Entry Ticket with Design Museum TicketNine steel spheres left over from a 1958 world fair. The top one is the view; the lift up to it is the wait.
03The chocolate hourChoco-Story Brussels: Chocolate Museum Entrance with TastingA working museum with tastings as you go, five minutes off the Grand Place. Cheap, indoors, and it settles the praline argument.
04The Flanders dayGreat War Flanders Fields Minibus Tour w/ LunchTyne Cot, Passchendaele and the Menin Gate in one minibus out of Bruges, lunch included. Keep the evening free afterwards.
The three things Belgium is known for are all bookable by the hour.
A marble slab and a piping bag, a cellar tasting that finally explains lambic, or a morning spent learning why the fries go in twice. Pick the one you would happily queue for, and let the other two be snacks.
Six Belgian cities, and the day out that each one is really about.
Half an hour of track separates most of them, so a bed in one is a day trip to the rest. Gabled market squares, two canal towns, the diamond quarter, the Salient and the Meuse.
Bruges and Ghent were built around water and still read best from it.
Fifty minutes on a Ghent boat costs less than lunch and shows you the guild fronts at the angle they were designed to be seen from. In Bruges the jetties are the queue, so book the sailing that comes bundled with a walking guide and skip it.
Most people give Brussels an afternoon. It answers better to two days.
Everything in Brussels →
The Grand Place is ten minutes and a photograph. The rest of the city is Art Nouveau terraces, comic-book murals three storeys high, a fries argument running for a century and the best beer list in Europe. These three carry more travellers than anything else here.
The Atomium, and whether the combo ticket earns it
Nine spheres built for the 1958 world fair, with the Design Museum next door on the same ticket. The view is from the top ball, and the lift up to it is the entire queue.
A chocolate bench, not another shop window
The city sells chocolate on every corner and teaches it in about a dozen kitchens. Workshops temper, pipe and box a bag of your own; museum tours taste as they walk. Either way you leave carrying something.
Horta’s Brussels, street by street
Victor Horta rebuilt whole terraces in iron and glass, and the city knocked a good deal of it down again in the sixties. What survives sits in the southern communes and has to be walked.
The days out that sell out between Brussels and the coast.
Every Belgian tour review →More travellers take these than anything else in the country, and each one earns the slot for a different reason.
1
Atomium Entry Ticket with Design Museum Ticket
Visit Brussels’ Atomium, the giant iron-crystal sculpture built for the 1958 World’s Fair, with access to its exhibitions and panoramic upper sphere. Your ticket also covers the nearby Design Museum Brussels, including its Plastics Design Collection. Bring a charged smartphone and headphones for the included game.
From · $19
Read our review →
2
Guided Day Trip to Bruges and Ghent
from $55
3
Bruges & Ghent Day Tour – 2 Fairytale Cities
from $57
4
50-Minute Medieval Center Guided Boat Trip
from $12
5
Choco-Story Brussels: Chocolate Museum Entrance with Tasting
from $18
6
Bruges and Ghent – Belgium’s Fairytale Cities – from Brussels
from $59
7
Small Group Boat Cruise and Guided Walking Tour
from $51
8
Hop-On Hop-Off Bus Tour
from $29
Bruges empties at six, which is the hour worth staying for.
The coaches arrive at ten and are gone by late afternoon. The Markt after dinner, the Begijnhof at first light and the back canals behind Sint-Anna belong to whoever booked a bed instead of a day return.
Every Bruges day out →
Every Belgian old town is a twenty-minute walk and a thousand years deep.
Guides here work the gap between the guidebook and the gossip: which guild house is a nineteenth-century fake, who was hanged on that corner, why the belfry leans. Almost all of it happens inside one square kilometre.
Ghent and Antwerp are where Belgians go when Bruges fills up.
Ghent keeps a moated castle in the middle of a student city and a row of guild houses on the Graslei that beats anything in the country at dusk. Antwerp has Rubens, the diamond quarter and a railway station people detour to look at. Both are half an hour from Brussels.
- 150-Minute Medieval Center Guided Boat Tripfrom $12
- 2Historical Walking Tour: Legends of Gentfrom $3
- 340 Minute Medieval Center Guided Boat Tourfrom $12
What a day out in Belgium actually costs.
Every tour on the site, grouped by what it charges. A surprising number of the good ones land under the price of lunch on the Grand Place.
Old-town walks, canal sailings, museum entries and the chocolate tastings.
Full days: Bruges and Ghent together, the Flanders Fields minibuses, a workshop with a bench of your own.
Private guides, small-group battlefield days and the long runs south into the Ardennes.
Three things that only happen in Belgium.
Gothic squares and good beer turn up all over northern Europe. A hundred and fifty kilometres of war graves, a city that paints comics on its gable ends, and Horta’s iron staircases do not.
Flanders Fields
The front barely moved here for four years and roughly half a million men died holding it. What is left is a landscape of cemeteries, mine craters and preserved trench lines within twenty minutes of Ypres, plus a bugle call under the Menin Gate every evening at eight, unbroken since 1928 apart from the second occupation. Guides run it out of Bruges and Brussels as well as from Ypres itself.
- 1Great War Flanders Fields Minibus Tour w/ Lunch★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 1,257 reviews
- 2Flanders Fields Remembrance Tour from Brussels★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 334 reviews
- 3Flanders Fields Remembrance Tour from Bruges★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 207 reviews
The Comic Book Walls
Brussels gave the world Tintin, the Smurfs and Lucky Luke, then started painting them three storeys high on the blank ends of terraces. There are more than sixty murals now, most of them walkable in an afternoon around the centre. The tours add the studios, the publishers and the arguments between them.
- 1The comic book walls walking tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 38 reviews
- 2Brussels through its comics murals★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 25 reviews
- 3Comic Book Tour in Brussels★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 14 reviews
Horta’s Townhouses
Victor Horta ran a staircase up the middle of a narrow terraced house, put a glass roof over it and changed European architecture inside about fifteen years. Four of his buildings are UNESCO-listed; most of the rest are still lived in, which is why these walks study facades and only ring a small number of doorbells.
- 1Brussels 3-Hour Guided Art Nouveau Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.0 · 282 reviews
- 2Art Nouveau Pass – Entry to Three Locations★★★★★★★★★★ 4.0 · 108 reviews
- 32-hours “Art Nouveau” Walking Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 7 reviews
Four Belgian bookings that will not wait.
Most of this country can be settled over breakfast. These four run on timed slots, benches that seat ten and minibuses with a dozen seats, and they are gone before you get there.
- 01Atomium Entry Ticket with Design Museum TicketEntry runs on timed slots and the lift to the top sphere is the bottleneck. On a wet Sunday the walk-up queue is the afternoon.
- 02Great War Flanders Fields Minibus Tour w/ LunchThe battlefield minibuses leave once a day with a dozen seats. They fill first in the weeks either side of Armistice Day.
- 03Belgian Chocolate Making Workshop with TastingsA chocolate bench seats ten or twelve. Weekend sessions in Brussels go days ahead; a midweek morning is the easier ask.
- 04Walking Tour, Canal Boat Trip w/Beer Tasting OptionThe canal boats are a daylight, fair-weather business and they tie up over the winter. From late autumn the first question is whether anything is sailing at all.
It rains about two days in five here. Book the indoor version first.
Belgian weather is not dramatic, it is persistent, and in any month it will take an afternoon off you. The local answer has always been the same: a cellar, a kitchen, a museum or a very long lunch, arranged before you are standing in the drizzle deciding.
By city — Flanders, Brussels and Wallonia
By kind of day — bench, boat, battlefield or bar
Brussels, Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp: four stops on one railway.
The newest Belgian tour reviews.
The rest of the new ones →
Luxury vehicle from Brussels airport to the city of Brussels
Read our review →
Transfer Brussels Airport (BRU) –> City Center 7 PAX (ONE WAY)
Read our review →
Luxury Minivan from Brussels airport to the city of Brussels
Read our review →
PRIVATE MPV TRANSFER FROM/TO BRUSSELS AIRPORT (Max 6 pax) ONE-WAY
Read our review →
Transfer Brussels Airport –> City MB E Class 1-3 PAX (ONE WAY)
Read our review →
Transfer Brussels Airport –> Brussels MB V Class 7 PAX (ONE WAY)
Read our review →
Discover Tournai while playing! Escape game – The alchemist
Read our review →
In Flanders Fields and Passchendaele Grand Tour
Read our review →
From LIlle or Bruges, Christmas Truce to Passchendaele Ypres 1 day WW1 private
Read our review →
From Ypres, The Christmas Truce to Passchendaele Ypres Based WW1 private tour
Read our review →
PRIVATE Australian Western Front Battlefields 3-Day Tour Ypres to Amiens
Read our review →