Bruges

A twelfth-century basilica on the Burg with a dim Romanesque chapel below and a Gothic one above, holding one of the most venerated relics in Christendom: a rock-crystal phial said to contain cloth soaked in the blood of Christ, brought back from the Crusades. It is shown for veneration every day and carried through the streets each Ascension. No photos inside, and silence expected.

Best shot The gilded, blackened Gothic facade with its gold statuary.

• Touristy

A private chapel built in the fifteenth century by the merchant Adornes family and modeled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, one of the strangest funerary buildings in Europe. It holds the black tomb of Anselm Adornes, murdered in Scotland in 1483, an altar carved with skulls, bones and ladders, and a low crypt you crawl into to reach a stone copy of Christ’s tomb. Still owned by the family.

Best shot The polygonal tower and lantern spire, unlike anything else in the city.

• Quiet

A brick church with a spire of some hundred and fifteen metres, among the tallest brickwork towers on earth, over the old town. Its choir holds Michelangelo’s marble Madonna, the only sculpture of his to leave Italy in his lifetime, beside the gilded recumbent tombs of Mary of Burgundy and Charles the Bold, crowned effigies lying on painted funeral chests.

Best shot The towering brick spire against the sky.

• Touristy

Bruges’ museum of the Flemish Primitives, hung with the nightmares as well as the masterpieces: Hieronymus Bosch’s Last Judgment, boiling with tortured souls and demons, and Gerard David’s Judgment of Cambyses, in which a corrupt judge is arrested and then, in graphic detail, flayed alive. Small, quiet, and darker than its reputation.

One of the oldest surviving hospital buildings in Europe, founded in the twelfth century, where monks and nuns nursed the sick and dying for seven hundred years. The medieval sickwards and old apothecary are a museum now, and the former chapel holds six Memling masterworks, among them the jewel-like St Ursula shrine.

Best shot The long brick hospital front on Mariastraat, the Church of Our Lady tower behind.

• Quiet

A walled ring of whitewashed houses around a hushed, tree-filled court, founded in 1245 for the beguines, lay religious women who lived in devotion without taking full vows. Benedictine nuns and single women live behind the gate now, and silence is asked of everyone who enters. Free, and otherworldly.

Best shot The white stepped-gable houses around the still courtyard.

• Quiet
• Solo-friendly

The eighty-three-metre bell tower over the Markt, begun in the thirteenth century, that once guarded the city’s charters locked in an iron chest in its stair. Three hundred and sixty-six narrow steps climb past the old treasury and a forty-seven-bell carillon to a windswept platform. Its leaning, soot-dark silhouette carried the film In Bruges.

Best shot The full tower rising over the Markt, best in mist.

• Touristy

A still, dark lake at the southern edge of the old town, once a medieval harbour basin. The legend says it is named for Minna, a girl who fled an arranged marriage and died in her lover’s arms, buried here under water he dammed over the grave. Couples cross the bridge to seal it anyway.

Best shot The lake, the lovers’ bridge and old lock-house reflected, best in morning fog.

• Quiet

Set in the Oude Steen, one of the oldest stone houses in Bruges and reputedly among the oldest prisons in Europe, a museum of medieval and early-modern torture and execution instruments, tracing the city’s grim history of crime and punishment. A combined ticket takes in an adjoining museum of witchcraft. Grisly, and it knows it.

• Touristy

A sixteen-room hotel made from four medieval houses joined in the 1720s, standing where two canals meet, its half-timbered gabled front one of the most photographed sights in Bruges and a backdrop in In Bruges. Inside it is dense with antiques and old paintings. Storybook, and expensive with it.

• Adults only
• Quiet

A romantic hotel strung along the Groenerei, one of the prettiest canals in the city, with individually decorated rooms, fireplaces and antiques, and an eighteenth-century salon that was once the tailors’ guild hall, ceiling and hearth intact. Candlelit and old-world.

• Adults only
• Quiet

A hotel in a building first recorded in 1470 on a quieter canal just north of the centre, with rooms over the water and breakfast served in a vaulted brick cellar, older still, that began as a canalside warehouse. Medieval bones, gently done.

• Quiet

A small B&B in a listed 1675 mansion that held the Den Hert brewery for three centuries, right on the Sint-Annarei canal, its rooms keeping their high beamed ceilings and tall windows over the water. Protected, characterful and quiet.

• Quiet

An intimate guesthouse in a medieval mansion of around 1450, built into the little lovers’ bridge on one of the loveliest canal corners in Bruges, with stone fireplaces, panelling and a walled medieval garden. Run now by a Flemish painter as guesthouse and studio both.

• Adults only
• Quiet

Founded in 1515, the oldest pub in Bruges and maybe in Belgium, made from two late-medieval houses, its beamed rooms hung with old portraits and warmed by an antique cast-iron stove, a leafy garden behind. Still a working brown café, five centuries in. Sit and let it be old around you.

Best shot The wood-beamed room and its old cast-iron stove.

• Adults only

A beer bar in an eight-hundred-year-old vaulted brick cellar a few steps off the Markt, the low stone arches making a hushed, candlelit underground room. Around twenty-six beers on tap and a hundred and fifty more by the bottle, the Trappists given pride of place.

Best shot The candlelit brick vaults underground.

• Adults only

A tiny wood-panelled brown café widely counted among the best bars in Bruges, its snug rooms crammed with breweriana and scribbled notes from decades of drinkers, and more than three hundred Belgian beers by the bottle. Dim, cluttered and serious about it.

• Adults only

A hidden two-level estaminet up a staircase down De Garre, one of the narrowest alleys in the city, famous for its strong house tripel served with a cube of cheese and a warning to slow down. The secret-passage way in and the low ceilings make it one of the best drinks in Bruges.

Best shot The narrow alley of De Garre leading to the door.

• Adults only

A tiny restaurant in the ground floor and thirteenth-century vaulted cellar of an old stepped-gable mansion near the Markt, themed head to toe on Belgium’s racing pigeons, down to the statues and racing bands, with slow charcoal-grilled pigeon and rabbit stewed in Bruges beer. Candlelit and strange in the best way.

• Adults only

A specialist in taxidermy and entomology in the middle of Bruges, mounted butterflies and beetles under glass domes and in frames, furs and hides and rustic oddments in an understated, robust style. A concentrated dose of natural-history macabre.

• Solo-friendly

A curiosity cabinet curated for over twenty years, packed with art, antiques, tribal pieces, vinyl and taxidermy, a stuffed giraffe head over the door and old theatre spotlights within. Open only a few afternoons a week, so it feels like a private collection you have stumbled into. One of the darkest interiors in town.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

A self-described curiosity shop inside a medieval communal house of 1667, sourced across Europe by one dealer for two decades: sculptures, antique clocks, crystal, silver, religious and Asian art and the odd unexplainable object. A real cabinet-of-curiosities dealer, not a tourist shop.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

An antiquarian bookshop since 1976 in an old corner building by St Salvator’s Cathedral, specialising in illustrated books from the fifteenth to twentieth century: medieval books of hours, incunabula, natural history, atlases and old medical works. Genuinely old, arcane stock, and it still runs rare-book auctions.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

An independent record shop and coffee-and-beer bar run by two local obsessives on the vintage-heavy Langestraat, new and second-hand vinyl leaning indie, jazz, soul and electronic, with the odd in-store gig. Crate-digging with an espresso in hand.

• Solo-friendly