Belgium is small. That is the whole advantage.
Bruges before the coaches land, a chocolate workshop you cook in yourself, a canal boat that costs less than lunch. Every tour you can book here, reviewed, priced and timed.
The most booked ticket in the country, and the four cities around it.
The four bookings a first Belgian trip is built on.
One long day out, one morning in Bruges, one wet afternoon indoors and one boat. What each costs and how long it runs.
01The long dayFrom Brussels: Guided Day Trip to Bruges and GhentBoth medieval centres in one run out of Brussels. The booking that makes a short trip feel twice as long.
02The Bruges morningSmall Group Boat Cruise and Guided Walking TourHalf an hour on the canals and a walk through the lanes behind them. Take the early slot, before eleven.
03The wet afternoonBelgian Chocolate Making Workshop with TastingsYou temper it, pipe it and carry the box out. The standard Belgian answer to rain, and it rains a lot.
04Fifty minutes50-Minute Medieval Center Guided Boat TripUnder the bridges of the old grain quay in Ghent, for less than the price of lunch on it.
Brussels, Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp: pick one, reach the rest by train.
Trains run every half hour and nothing worth seeing is more than an hour away, so the city you sleep in matters less here than it would anywhere else. What each one is actually good at:
Bruges and Ghent in a day, from Brussels, Amsterdam or Paris.
No town in this part of Europe is day-tripped harder than Bruges. Coaches leave three capitals for it every morning, and the good ones fold Ghent in on the way back. You gain a whole medieval centre in one day. You give up the evening in it, which is when both are at their best.
Brussels gives you one free square and a hundred paid afternoons.
Everything in Brussels →
The Grand Place costs nothing and takes twenty minutes. What fills the rest of the day is under cover: a chocolate workshop, the Art Nouveau houses, a bar with a beer list that needs an index. These three carry more travellers than anything else in the city.
The Atomium, and what to pair with it
Nine steel spheres built for the 1958 world fair, with a lift to the top one for the view over the Heysel plateau. The Design Museum next door is on the same ticket, and Mini-Europe is a hundred metres away if there are children involved.
A workshop, not a shop tour
Tempering, piping, moulding. The good ones put you at the marble slab with an apron rather than behind a rope, and two hours later you leave with more pralines than you can reasonably carry home.
Beer, fries, and the streets between them
Through the Sablon and the lanes off the Grand Place, stopping at the counters that locals queue at rather than the ones with photographs on the menu. Most of them finish in a bar.
What Belgium actually books.
Every Belgian tour reviewed →Cheap tickets and long day trips lead this list, which tells you exactly how people use a country this size: one base, one train, one big day.
1
Atomium Entry Ticket with Design Museum Ticket
Review of Brussels’ Atomium and Design Museum ticket, with panoramic views, light shows, practical tips, value advice, and access notes.
From · $19
Read our review →
2
From Brussels: Guided Day Trip to Bruges and Ghent
from $55
3
From Brussels: 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
From Brussels: Luxembourg Tour with Dinant Visit
from $77
Bruges is a morning town. The coaches arrive at eleven.
By midday the Markt is three deep and the boat queue is forty minutes long. Before nine it is yours, and so is the Begijnhof with the swans on the water outside it. Book the canal boat for the early slot and keep the afternoon for somewhere with a roof.
Every Bruges day out →
Ghent and Antwerp are where the day trips do not stop.
Ghent has a moated castle in the middle of the shopping streets and a student population that keeps the bills honest. Antwerp has Rubens, the diamond quarter and a railway station that gets photographed more than the cathedral. Neither of them fills up the way Bruges does.
- 150-Minute Medieval Center Guided Boat Tripfrom $12
- 2Historical Walking Tour: Legends of Antwerp
- 3Historical Walking Tour: Legends of Gentfrom $3
Belgium sells three things to eat, and one of them you make yourself.
Three kinds of afternoon, what each costs to join, and where most of them run. The workshops fill first because a table only holds so many people.
★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 2.5-Hour Belgian Chocolate Making Workshop
Chocolate workshopsYou temper it, pipe it and take the box home.
Beer tastingsTrappist, lambic and the sour ones, poured in order.
Waffle sessionsLiege dough or Brussels batter. They are not the same thing.
Everything edibleMarket walks, fries counters, cheese and the rest of it.
All 58 tastings and food walks →
What a day out in Belgium costs, from a tip to a private car.
Every tour here, grouped by what it costs. The cheap end is not a compromise: the best old-town walks in Bruges and Ghent are the ones you pay for at the end, in cash, at whatever you thought it was worth.
Tip-based old-town walks, museum entries, the canal boats and both chocolate museums.
Workshops where you do the cooking, beer tastings, bike tours and the long day out to two cities.
Private guides, the small-group days out to the Western Front, and cars that collect you from the hotel.
Three things Belgium does that its neighbours do not bother with.
Old towns and cathedrals are everywhere in this corner of Europe. A praline you piped yourself, a beer poured in the order the brewery insists on, and a boat that fits under a twelfth-century bridge are not.
Piping your own pralines
Belgian chocolate is a technique before it is a flavour: the tempering, the snap, the shell thin enough to break under a thumb. The workshops hand you an apron and put you at the slab for two hours rather than walking you past a production line. Brussels has the most of them and Bruges the prettiest rooms to do it in.
- 1Hungry Mary’s Famous Beer and Chocolate Tour in Brussels★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 2,258 reviews
- 2Belgian Chocolate Making Workshop with Tastings★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 1,629 reviews
- 32.5-Hour Belgian Chocolate Making Workshop★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 933 reviews
Trappist, lambic and the sour ones
Abbeys here still brew inside the walls, and the lambic cellars west of Brussels ferment with whatever is living in the air of the room. A tasting runs light to dark and sweet to sour, and every beer arrives in its own glass, because the brewery will not have it any other way.
- 1Walking Tour, Canal Boat Trip w/Beer Tasting Option★★★★★★★★★★ 4.4 · 2,759 reviews
- 2Belgian Beer Tasting in Brussels★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 1,280 reviews
- 3Belgian Waffle-Making Workshop with Beer Tasting★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 960 reviews
The medieval canal boats
Ghent and Bruges were built around water and the boats still go where the streets cannot, ducking under bridges low enough that everybody has to sit down. Fifty minutes in Ghent, half an hour in Bruges, and the Ghent one costs less than the lunch you have afterwards.
- 150-Minute Medieval Center Guided Boat Trip★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 5,637 reviews
- 2Small Group Boat Cruise and Guided Walking Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 4,102 reviews
- 3Walking Tour, Canal Boat Trip w/Beer Tasting Option★★★★★★★★★★ 4.4 · 2,759 reviews
Four Belgian bookings that will not wait until you land.
Most of this country can be arranged over breakfast on the day. These four run on a fixed number of seats, a timed slot or the weather, and none of them cares what time your train gets in.
- 01Belgian Chocolate Making Workshop with TastingsA workshop is one table and a fixed number of aprons. Saturday sittings in Brussels go days before you arrive.
- 02Atomium Entry Ticket with Design Museum TicketEntry runs on timed slots and the lift to the top sphere is the bottleneck. The slots people want are the ones that go.
- 0350-Minute Medieval Center Guided Boat TripThe canal boats stop for the winter and run on the weather. A February visit has no boat at all, and a squall closes them mid-afternoon.
- 04Belgian Beer Tasting in BrusselsTastings are poured for one group at one sitting. There is no walking in and no second pour later.
It rains in Belgium roughly every other day. Book accordingly.
Nobody comes for the weather and the country has organised itself around that. The best wet afternoons are the ones you booked in advance: a chocolate workshop, a brewery under the pavement, a museum with a queue you have already skipped. All of them within a tram ride of wherever the rain caught you.
The Western Front is an hour from Bruges.
The salient around Ypres holds Tyne Cot, the largest Commonwealth cemetery in the world, and the Menin Gate, where fifty-four thousand names cover the walls of men who were never found. The farmland between them still turns up shells every spring. Tours run in small groups from Bruges and Brussels and take the whole day.
- 1From Bruges: Great War Flanders Fields Minibus Tour w/ Lunch9 hours
- 2From IEPER Private 4-hour Tour of the Ypres Battlefield4 hours (approx.)
- 3Flanders Fields Remembrance Tour from Brussels13 hours (approx.)
Every Belgian old town is a walking town, and half the guides work for tips.
The centres are small enough to cross in twenty minutes, which is why walking is the best value on offer here. The Legends walks in Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp charge almost nothing to reserve and take whatever you think it was worth at the end of it.
Brussels, Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp: four stops on one train line.
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