Ghent

A moated stone fortress rebuilt in 1180 for the Counts of Flanders, dropped whole into the middle of the city, its black battlements mirrored in the water. Inside is a museum of the things the counts did to people: a guillotine, branding irons and racks of torture and execution gear, laid out in the cold chambers where the castle later served as courthouse and prison. Climb the walls, then go down to the dungeon.

Best shot The moated walls and drum towers reflected in the water.

• Touristy

A great Gothic cathedral raised over three centuries, best known for the Van Eyck brothers’ Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, whose 2019 cleaning uncovered the Lamb’s disturbingly human face, front-on and staring. The altarpiece is away being restored until spring 2027, but the cathedral stays open, and the real find is downstairs: a Romanesque crypt of medieval tombs and faded wall paintings.

Best shot The crypt tombs and old wall paintings, or the towers seen from the belfry.

• Touristy

A museum of the history of psychiatry set inside Belgium’s oldest surviving asylum, a grim neo-Gothic pile of 1857. The collection is restraint chairs and treatment devices, unsettling clinical photographs of nineteenth-century patients, and rooms of outsider art made by the confined. The building does half the work: austere, institutional and genuinely uneasy.

Best shot The long tree-lined approach to the red-brick asylum chapel.

• Quiet

A cemetery on a hill north-east of the centre, laid out in 1847 and often called the Flemish Père-Lachaise, where hundreds of Flanders’ writers, painters and composers are buried. The slope is crowded with weathered nineteenth-century tombs, weeping statues and mausolea, all leaning together toward the church at the top. A long, quiet climb through the dead.

Best shot Uphill through the ranks of tilting graves toward the church.

• Quiet
• Solo-friendly

The ninety-one-metre bell tower that has watched the city since 1313, a gilded copper dragon turning on its spire as its guardian. At its foot the baroque Mammelokker carries a carving of the old Roman story of a man condemned to starve in prison and kept secretly alive at his daughter’s breast. The tower still holds its old secret cell. Grim views from the top.

Best shot The lit tower and its gilded dragon against a deep-blue dusk.

• Touristy

A black thirteenth-century stone house on the canal, named for a knight so dark of hair and skin the city called him the Devil. Behind its bluestone walls and corner turrets it has been an armoury, a madhouse and prison where the insane were chained, an orphanage and a fire station. Now it holds the state archives, so admire it from the street.

Best shot The turreted grey flank raking along the Reep.

• Solo-friendly

One of the oldest churches in Ghent, begun in the early thirteenth century in blue-grey Tournai stone as the merchants’ and sailors’ church by the old harbour. A single tall lantern tower rises over the crossing instead of the front, and the interior is all soaring, austere grey stone. Free, cavernous and usually near empty.

Best shot The church looming in front with the Belfry rising behind.

• Quiet

The university’s science collection, staged as a museum about doubt and getting things wrong, beside the botanical garden. The cabinets hold anatomical and pathological specimens, human skeletons and skulls, wax models and old instruments pulled from a store of four hundred thousand objects. The rows of jars give the whole thing a fine morbid edge.

Best shot The anatomy cabinets, skeletons and specimen jars.

• Quiet

The remains of a Benedictine abbey founded in the seventh century and torn down in 1540 by Charles V to punish a Ghent revolt, leaving a Romanesque cloister, a refectory and an octagonal washhouse standing quiet by the water. A lapidarium of old carved tombstones and grave slabs is gathered under the arches. A hidden, ruined corner of the city, open weekends in the warmer months.

Best shot The ruined cloister and its rows of salvaged tombstones.

• Quiet
• Solo-friendly

A hotel inside Ghent’s old head post office, a neo-Gothic landmark on the Korenmarkt under a clock tower, done out deliberately dark: velvet, deep colour and kept period detail, with the Cobbler cocktail bar tucked inside. The rooms look over the Graslei and the three medieval towers. Moody in exactly the right way.

• Adults only

A hotel in a former convent and beguinage whose roots go back to 1278, later rebuilt in neo-Gothic, so you sleep among cloistered courtyards, vaulted corridors and a preserved chapel. Hushed and monastic, a short walk west of the centre.

• Quiet

A twelve-room hotel in an 1840 baron’s townhouse ten minutes from the cathedral, keeping its high ceilings, wooden floors and marble fireplaces, with a lounge, a walled garden and a small spa. Small, characterful and central.

• Quiet

A design B&B in an eighteenth-century rococo mansion in the old centre, each room dressed differently in period detail, odd antiques and contemporary art, with a formal French garden hidden behind. Theatrical and layered.

• Adults only
• Quiet

A larger hotel built around the 1724 townhouse of Baron de Reylof, grandly done in Louis XIV style with a courtyard, a restaurant and a spa in the baron’s old carriage house. The most polished of the city’s stays.

• Adults only

Reputedly the smallest and oldest café in Ghent, a bar since 1776 in a building that was once a tripe house, its back room a gallows house where the condemned waited out their last hours. Low, cramped and candlelit, with an old brick cellar below. Drink where they did not get to.

Best shot The tiny crooked frontage on the Groentenmarkt, or the brick cellar below.

• Adults only

A brown beer café in a gabled canal house said once to have been a brothel, pouring around a hundred and sixty Belgian beers including its own, with a terrace on the water under the medieval meat hall. Live jazz and blues most nights. Old Ghent to the core.

• Adults only

One of the oldest and darkest brown cafés in the city, hung with cartwheels and lanterns, five hundred beers on the list and the Kwak served in its boot-shaped glass, for which you hand over a shoe as ransom. Knowingly touristy, but the room is the real thing.

• Adults only
• Touristy

A tiny candlelit jenever bar right on the water, pouring nothing but Belgian dreupels, more than two hundred of them, many flavoured in house. Wood-panelled, cramped and one of the most characterful corners in the old city.

• Adults only

A candlelit all-you-can-eat spare-ribs brasserie in an old house in the medieval Patershol quarter, the dining room thick with vintage clutter, antique mirrors and art nouveau glass. A loud, warm, gothic-tavern institution.

• Adults only

A family antiques gallery in a disused eighteenth-century baroque chapel by Sint-Jacobs, some three thousand things piled up under the vaulted ceiling and stained glass: old leather books, boxes of prints and cutlery, oil paintings, odd statues. A real cabinet of curiosities you can walk into and buy from.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

A vintage and curiosities shop staged inside a deconsecrated neo-Gothic church in the old port, taxidermy birds, architectural models, antique lighting and rare design arranged between the columns under the arches. Macabre meets design, in one of the most atmospheric rooms in the city.

• Solo-friendly

A strictly second-hand record shop going since 1998, crates deep in metal, new wave, post-punk, soul and soundtracks, with a fresh stack put out every week and no glossy new-release wall. Diggers’ territory, good for the darker end of the racks.

• Solo-friendly

The Infernal Ball: a used-book café with some twenty thousand second-hand books lining the walls to browse, buy or swap, and a bar pouring coffee, Belgian beer and cocktails late into the night. Dim, book-crammed and exactly the right kind of den.

• Solo-friendly
• Adults only

An independent vintage store deep in eighties and nineties stock: worn leather jackets, band and graphic tees, boots, old sunglasses and racks of second-hand vinyl. A proper treasure-hunt for a darker wardrobe.

• Solo-friendly