BrusselsBruxelles / Brussel

Brussels traces its founding to around 979, when Charles, Duke of Lower Lorraine, built a fort on an island in the river Senne. The name is often linked to Old Dutch for "settlement on the marsh", which fits the site: the Senne valley was wet ground, and the city that grew there kept fighting its river long after the fort was gone. That island, Saint-Géry, is a modest square today, easy to pass without noticing it is where the city began.

By the 13th and 14th centuries Brussels was a major stop on the cloth trade between the Rhine and the English Channel, wealthy enough for its craft guilds to win representation in city government alongside the old patrician families. That wealth built the Grand-Place, though almost nothing standing there today predates 1695. In two days that August, French artillery under Marshal de Villeroy, acting on the orders of Louis XIV, bombarded the city and destroyed most of the square and thousands of buildings around it. The guilds rebuilt within about four years, in Baroque stone rather than the wood and plaster that had burned, which is why the square reads as a unified 17th-century set piece rather than a patchwork of centuries.

Brussels served as a capital more than once before it was ever the capital of an independent Belgium. It was a seat of the Dukes of Brabant, then of the Burgundian and Habsburg Netherlands — briefly the administrative heart of an empire under Charles V that stretched from the Americas to Central Europe — then of the Austrian Habsburgs through the 18th century, with a short interruption of French annexation after 1795. When the Belgian Revolution broke out at the opera house in 1830 and the country won independence from the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Brussels was the natural choice as capital of the new state.

The 19th century reshaped the city as much as any war. The Senne had become an open sewer as the city industrialised, and between 1867 and 1871 it was vaulted over; the wide central boulevards that now cut through the old street pattern, from the Bourse to Place de Brouckère, sit on top of the buried river. The 20th century added a second capital function on top of the first: Brussels became host to the forerunners of the European Union from the 1950s and to NATO from 1967, and the building boom that followed — a coinage in urban planning, "Brusselization", for the demolition of historic streets to make way for offices and a road tunnel — still shows in parts of the European Quarter.

The Pentagon — what Brussels residents call the old centre inside the ring boulevards that trace the vanished 14th-century city walls — is really several small towns pressed together. The lower town around the Grand-Place was trade and guilds; the upper town around Place Royale and the Coudenberg, where a royal palace once stood before it burned in 1731, was aristocracy and government. That difference in elevation and character survives: the walk up from the Grand-Place towards the Sablon and the Royal Museums climbs a real hill, and it also climbs a social one.

South of the grand museums, the Marolles sits in the shadow of the Palais de Justice, a vast 19th-century law-courts building so large it was, at completion in 1883, reportedly the biggest structure built anywhere in the 19th century. The Marolles below it stayed a working-class, French-speaking neighbourhood even as the rest of the city grew more prosperous, and its flea market on Place du Jeu de Balle — daily, busiest at dawn — is a genuine local market rather than a tourist recreation of one.

East of the centre, the European Quarter is the newest neighbourhood in the old city's story, built up from the 1950s around what became the European Commission's Berlaymont headquarters and the roundabout at Schuman. It is deliberately international: flags, glass towers, multilingual signage, and, on weekdays when the institutions are working, a very different crowd from the rest of Brussels. On weekends, when the desks empty out, it can feel closer to an office park than a neighbourhood.

Saint-Gilles and neighbouring Ixelles, south of the centre, grew up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as Brussels expanded beyond its walls, and they absorbed the city's Art Nouveau building boom more than any other district. Victor Horta built his own house and studio on Rue Américaine in Saint-Gilles, now the Horta Museum, and the surrounding streets still carry his and his contemporaries' curved ironwork and glass on buildings that are simply lived in, not museums.

Brussels' signature architectural export is Art Nouveau, and its clearest starting point has a date: 1893, when the architect Victor Horta completed the Hôtel Tassel for a client, using an iron-and-glass structural frame and curved, plant-like ornament throughout the interior in a way no European building had combined before. Horta went on to design his own house and studio nearby, now the Horta Museum, along with several other town houses across the city; four of his buildings, including the Hôtel Tassel and his own house, are listed together as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The style spread quickly through Brussels' growing southern districts in the 1890s and 1900s, as other architects — Paul Hankar, Victor Horta's contemporaries and followers — applied the same curved lines, wrought iron and stained glass to ordinary town houses, not only grand commissions. Much of it survives simply because it kept being lived in: walking the streets around Saint-Gilles and Ixelles turns up doorways, window frames and iron balconies from the period on buildings with no plaque at all.

The Grand-Place itself represents an earlier and very different architectural moment: Baroque guildhalls rebuilt at speed after 1695, ornate but built to a strict, shared street line the guilds imposed on each other, which is why the square reads as one composition rather than a jumble of separate buildings. The 19th century added its own layer with the Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert, opened in 1847 as one of Europe's first glass-roofed shopping arcades, a building type that let Brussels shop in comfort regardless of its wet climate — a very practical piece of architectural history.

The Cinquantenaire complex is a third architectural moment again: built for the 1880 exhibition marking 50 years of Belgian independence, with the triumphal arch completed only in 1905 under Leopold II, in a grand, imperial style that borrowed from Rome more than from anything local. It sits at the edge of the European Quarter, so a single walk east from the centre passes through three very different centuries of what Brussels wanted to look like.

Belgium's comic-strip tradition is centred on Brussels in a way few other cities can claim for any art form. Hergé, the creator of Tintin, worked in the city; Peyo created the Smurfs here; Morris drew Lucky Luke. The city funds a Comic Strip Route of large wall murals — dozens across the centre and beyond — and the Belgian Comic Strip Center occupies a former textile warehouse designed by Victor Horta, so the building itself belongs to the earlier architectural story as much as to this one.

Chocolate has a specific Brussels claim to fame: the filled praline, now the standard form of a "Belgian chocolate", was invented in 1912 by Jean Neuhaus, working from a shop inside the Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert. His family's shop is still there. Chocolate had been sold in Brussels for much longer — Belgium's colonial history in the Congo, a dark and separate part of this story, made cocoa and its trade politically and economically significant to the country from the late 19th century — but the filled, bite-sized praline as visitors know it today is a 20th-century Brussels invention.

Brussels sits in the Senne valley, and that geography gave the region a beer style found almost nowhere else: lambic, fermented spontaneously by wild yeasts naturally present in the local air rather than a cultivated strain. Gueuze, a blend of young and old lambics, and kriek, a cherry-flavoured lambic, both descend from this tradition; the Cantillon brewery in Anderlecht still makes lambic the traditional way and is open to visitors. None of Belgium's six Trappist breweries sits inside Brussels itself, but all are sold in its bars.

Frites are claimed by both Belgium and France as a national invention, and the argument is old enough that neither side is likely to concede it. What is not disputed is the Brussels frituur culture: twice-fried potato in paper cones, sold from dedicated stands rather than as a side dish, with a wide menu of sauces beyond ketchup. The waffle culture splits in two as well — the light, rectangular Brussels waffle and the denser, caramelised Liège waffle are different pastries with different origins, sold side by side across the city regardless of which region they properly belong to.

Brussels became an international capital almost by accident of timing. When the founding members of what became the European Union needed a seat for the European Coal and Steel Community's institutions in the 1950s, Brussels was a compromise location — central, already home to some diplomatic infrastructure, and not the capital of one of the larger founding states. Decades of further treaties layered the European Commission, the Council of the European Union and, part-time, the European Parliament onto the city, alongside NATO's headquarters from 1967 (NATO moved into a newly built headquarters near the airport in 2018).

The result is a city with two distinct rhythms. On weekdays the European Quarter around Schuman fills with staff, lobbyists and journalists, and the bars around Place du Luxembourg — known locally as "Plux" — are busiest on Thursday evenings, the informal end of the institutional week. On weekends the same streets can feel closed, since the restaurants and cafés that serve the weekday crowd often do not bother opening for a mostly empty neighbourhood.

Brussels-Capital Region is legally bilingual, French and Dutch, a status that reflects Belgium's own division between French-speaking Wallonia and Dutch-speaking Flanders, with Brussels historically Dutch-speaking but now overwhelmingly French-speaking day to day, surrounded by Flemish territory. Every official sign, street name and government document appears in both languages, which is why place names in this guide often carry two forms — Grand-Place and Grote Markt, Sablon and Zavel — describing the same location.

The EU presence has not erased the older city so much as sat down beside it. A ten-minute metro ride separates the flags and roundabouts of the European Quarter from the guildhalls of the Grand-Place, and the contrast is part of what makes Brussels an unusual capital to visit: a small, walkable historic core, and beside it the working machinery of a continental institution, with comic murals and chocolate shops belonging entirely to neither.