Things To Do in Antwerp Belgium

Fashion and Design

Antwerp produced one of the most influential waves of fashion talent in the late 20th century, and the city's identity as a fashion capital has been sustained by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, whose fashion department continues to produce designers who reshape how clothes are made and worn. The shopping streets around the Nationalestraat and Kammenstraat are where the industry is most visible — independent designers and concept stores operating alongside the studios and ateliers that feed them.

Diamonds and Trade Heritage

Antwerp controls a significant share of the world's diamond trade, and the diamond district around the central station is one of the most concentrated commercial zones of its kind anywhere. The city's trading heritage goes back further — in the 16th century Antwerp was the most important commercial port in Europe, and the wealth that flowed through it funded an extraordinary flowering of art and architecture. The Rockox House museum and the Rubenshuis both give a sense of what Antwerp's Golden Age actually looked like from the inside.

Art and the Rubens Legacy

The Royal Museum of Fine Arts holds one of the best collections of Flemish Old Masters in existence, and the city as a whole is scattered with altarpieces, guild commissions, and civic portraits that remain in the buildings they were made for. The Cathedral of Our Lady contains four major paintings by Rubens, who spent most of his career in the city. For all its contemporary fashion credentials, Antwerp's relationship with 17th-century painting is the deepest thread in its cultural identity.

Port and Waterfront

The Port of Antwerp is one of the largest in the world, and the river Scheldt that made the city great still runs along its western edge. The old docklands south of the center — the Eilandje district — have been steadily redeveloped, with the MAS museum tower and the renovated warehouse streets now drawing visitors to an area that still feels raw enough to be interesting. River cruises offer a different perspective on the city, showing the scale of the port infrastructure from the water.

Diamonds, Fashion and Antwerp's Creative Industries

Antwerp's position as the global center of the diamond trade — approximately 80 per cent of the world's rough diamonds pass through the city annually — is most visible in the Diamond Quarter around the Central Station, where four diamond bourses and hundreds of dealers, cutters, and polishers operate within a few streets of each other in a trade that has been concentrated here since the 15th century. The Diamond Museum (DIVA) on Suikerrui presents the history and craft of the trade alongside the broader history of Antwerp as a center of goldsmithing and silverwork. The city's fashion industry, centered on the Royal Academy of Fine Arts whose fashion department produced the Antwerp Six in the 1980s — the group of designers including Dries Van Noten and Ann Demeulemeester who redefined Belgian fashion internationally — continues to produce graduates of international significance and has given Antwerp a fashion identity that punches far above its weight relative to Paris, Milan, and London. The ModeMuseum (MoMu) in the Fashion District documents this tradition alongside international fashion history in permanent and temporary exhibitions that make it one of the most serious fashion museums in Europe.

The Scheldt, the Port and Antwerp's Maritime and Industrial Heritage

Antwerp's position as the second-largest port in Europe — after Rotterdam — has shaped its physical form, its wealth, and its cosmopolitan character since the 16th-century Golden Age when it was the most important trading city in the world. The port complex north of the city center, the largest in Europe by total cargo volume after Rotterdam, is not generally accessible to the public, but the Museum aan de Stroom (MAS) on the former dock quays presents the city's history through collections of port archaeology, ethnography, and world trade in a tower building whose rooftop observation deck provides the most panoramic view of the city, the river, and the port available from any accessible structure. The Eilandje district around the MAS, formerly a derelict dock area, has been transformed into a neighbourhood of galleries, restaurants, and residential conversions anchored by the Red Star Line Museum — in the former emigration halls from which two million Europeans departed for America between 1873 and 1934. The Scheldt waterfront south of the center, with the restored Sint-Andries neighbourhood and the Zurenborg district of Art Nouveau bourgeois housing, extends the city's heritage circuit beyond the established center into streets whose character reflects Antwerp's 19th-century commercial prosperity. The Plantin-Moretus Museum, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the only printing workshop in the world on the UNESCO list, preserves intact the Renaissance printing house of Christophe Plantin who produced the most important scholarly editions of the 16th century including the Biblia Regia polyglot Bible, with original Gutenberg presses, copper engraving plates, and the account books of a business that supplied the intellectual world of early modern Europe. The Rubens House, where Peter Paul Rubens lived and worked from 1616 until his death in 1640, is the most visited house museum in Belgium and preserves the studio, living quarters, and Italianate garden of the artist who defined the Flemish Baroque and whose works are distributed through the major churches and museums of the city in a density that makes Antwerp the city most saturated with his production. The Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, reopened in 2022 after twelve years of renovation, holds the national collection of Flemish Masters alongside modern and contemporary Belgian art in a building whose restored galleries are among the finest in the Low Countries.