Antwerp

Belgium’s largest Gothic church, begun in 1352 and never quite finished, a single hundred-and-twenty-three-metre openwork spire over the medieval core. Inside hang two of Rubens’ most violent altarpieces, the shadow-drenched Descent from the Cross and Raising of the Cross, staged like moments of stopped catastrophe. The dim nave and skeletal spire give it a properly funereal grandeur.

Best shot The lone Gothic spire against the sky from the Handschoenmarkt.

• Touristy

A late-Gothic Dominican church whose walled churchyard was turned into a macabre open-air rockery in the early eighteenth century: some sixty-three life-size stone saints, angels and prophets climb an artificial Calvary hill, and beneath it a cave holds figures of souls writhing in purgatory beside a sculpted tomb of Christ. One of the strangest devotional sites in Europe, half pilgrimage, half grotto of the dead.

Best shot The purgatory grotto and its figures, shot low and tight.

• Quiet

A jewel-box collection built by a nineteenth-century connoisseur around one terrifying picture: Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Dulle Griet, Mad Meg, a sword-drawn peasant woman striding across a burning, monster-ridden hell to loot the mouth of it. The museum’s own neo-Gothic house is shut for restoration to around 2030, but Dulle Griet and ninety other works are on show nearby at the Maagdenhuis until 2027.

The UNESCO-listed home and workshop of the Plantin-Moretus printing dynasty, in business from 1576 into the nineteenth century, holding the two oldest surviving printing presses in the world. Ink-black workshops, oak-panelled rooms hung with dark old-master portraits and a cabinet of rare books make the whole time-frozen house quietly eerie.

Best shot The two ancient presses in the dim print room, or the vine-shrouded courtyard.

• Quiet

Antwerp’s great park cemetery, eighty-odd hectares laid out around an old moated castle and opened in 1921. Its old-graves quarter is a forest of weathered angels, obelisks and mourning figures, war graves among them, and it holds most of Flanders’ dead writers, painters and composers. Widely called the most beautiful cemetery in the country, and usually empty.

Best shot The old-graves section, moss-covered angels in morning mist.

• Quiet
• Solo-friendly

The oldest building in Antwerp, a squat stone fortress whose core goes back to the early thirteenth century, once the city’s castle and later a notorious prison. Over the gate leers a carved relief of Semini, an old fertility god, and the dark riverside masonry gives it a storybook menace. Restored in 2021 as a visitor centre.

Best shot A low angle from Steenplein, the turret against a grey Scheldt sky.

• Touristy

A lavish Brabantine Gothic church, built from 1491 as the parish of Antwerp’s rich, and the burial place of Rubens, who lies in a private chapel behind the high altar under one of his own paintings. Crammed with black-and-white marble tombs, memento mori and shadowy side chapels, it is really a baroque mausoleum you can walk through.

• Quiet

A five-hundred-and-seventy-metre pedestrian tunnel bored thirty metres under the river in 1933, linking the old city to the left bank. You go down on some of the last working solid-oak escalators in the world into a long, white-tiled, faintly clinical passage lit end to end, open around the clock and often deserted. One of the most quietly uncanny spaces in the city.

Best shot The wooden escalator plunging down, or the empty tiled tunnel straight on.

• Solo-friendly

A tower of stacked red sandstone and wavy glass in the old harbour, telling the story of the port and, among much else, how different cultures handle death, with memento mori and funerary objects in its collections. The free rooftop gives a brooding view over the docks. Top-heavy and monolithic, gothic in a modern key.

Best shot The stacked-block tower from the dock at dusk, or the rooftop over the port.

A design-led luxury boutique in three linked sixteenth-century townhouses behind a famous pink door, eleven rooms only, antique meeting contemporary in that particular moody Antwerp way. Small, hushed and expensive, with a Michelin Key to prove it.

• Adults only
• Quiet

One of the first boutique hotels in the city, in two renovated sixteenth-century townhouses, all subdued architecture, design furniture and vintage finds arranged like an aesthete’s home. A hidden courtyard and a rooftop terrace add to the tucked-away calm.

• Adults only

A seven-room stay in a fifteenth-century former merchant’s house, each room named for a gemstone and dressed in rich rococo colour, terracotta, emerald, sapphire, by a noted interior designer and an artist. A ground-floor library, an open fire and a secret walled garden. A jewel box, deliberately.

• Adults only
• Quiet

A five-star hotel in a restored former bank, named for the old franc, the bank’s original vault now an atmospheric wine cellar, marble floors and neo-classical columns kept throughout. A quiet garden and library, and a well-regarded restaurant. Grand, and a little severe.

• Adults only

A restaurant and tavern in a set of restored medieval brick cellars under the old town, long communal tables and benches lit by candle in the curved underground rooms, Belgian classics and a deep beer list. As close as eating gets to a medieval undercroft.

• Adults only

A candlelit restaurant hidden in a vaulted medieval cellar down the picturesque Vlaeykensgang alley, running since 1972, grilling lamb and beef over an open fire in the stone-walled room below. Intimate, rustic and hard to find, which is the point.

Best shot The Vlaeykensgang alley you slip down to reach it.

• Adults only

A classic Antwerp brown café on the Grote Markt facing the guild houses, going since around 1903 and barely changed, pouring the local De Koninck bolleke and jenever to a mix of regulars and passers-through. Dark, worn and thoroughly old-world.

• Adults only
• Touristy

A proper Antwerp jenever house, bar and small distillery with more than two hundred Belgian genevers on the list, an old wood-lined room full of locals, open late into the night near the cathedral. Order a flight and stay a while.

• Adults only

A traditional brown café on the old Stadswaag square, once named by a British paper among the best bars in the world, home to Antwerp’s Beer College and a deep Belgian beer list, wood-panelled and full of locals and students. No frills, all character.

• Adults only

An antiquarian and second-hand bookshop on the literary Hendrik Conscienceplein, sharing a wall with the baroque Carolus Borromeus church, strong on art, design, photography and literature, with collector’s editions, curiosities and ephemera and its own imprint. Creaking, tightly shelved, a dark-academia pilgrimage.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

An avant-garde designer resale shop in the fashion district, trading since 2002 in the city’s own history: early Antwerp Six work, Margiela, Ann Demeulemeester, Raf Simons, Yohji Yamamoto, Comme des Garçons. The place to build a black-clad wardrobe with a pedigree.

• Solo-friendly

An antiquarian bookshop since 1993 on Kloosterstraat, the city’s antiques row, wedged among the dealers, its shelves deep in rare and old books on art, applied arts and history, from fifteenth-century books of hours to Antwerpiana. Cramped and old-paper-scented, a collector’s browse.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

A small, tightly curated electronic record shop in the centre, house, techno and the rest on vinyl, the sort of place the local diggers rate over any big store. A good hour of crates.

• Solo-friendly

A self-styled cabinet of curiosities near the Kleine Markt, design objects, stationery, books and homeware all chosen for an oddball edge, sharing its space with a stack from a local bookshop. The wonder-cabinet end of the dark, bookish aesthetic.

• Solo-friendly