Things To Do in Brussels Belgium

European Capital and Politics

Brussels is the de facto capital of the European Union and headquarters of NATO, which gives it a political weight unusual for a city of its size. The European Quarter in the east of the city is a concentrated zone of institutions, lobbying firms, and international organizations, creating a distinct neighbourhood economy. Visits to EU institutions are possible by booking, and the sense of being at the center of a large political project is genuinely tangible.

Art Nouveau Architecture

Brussels is one of the birthplaces of Art Nouveau, and the city has more significant buildings from the movement than anywhere else in the world. The Victor Horta Museum — in the house and studio the architect built for himself — is the best place to understand the movement's commitment to total design, where staircases, door handles, and window frames form part of a coherent visual language. Art Nouveau buildings are scattered throughout the Ixelles, Saint-Gilles, and Etterbeek communes, and walking between them is the best way to see the city.

Beer and Food Culture

Belgium has one of the world's most diverse and sophisticated brewing traditions, and Brussels is its best city for experiencing it. The city has bars devoted to Belgian beer in all its forms — lambic, gueuze, Trappist ales, farmhouse saisons — where lists run to hundreds of options and bar staff know their material. Brussels food is similarly serious: moules-frites, waterzooi, carbonnade, and an array of chocolate and pastry traditions that have earned international recognition.

Comics and Popular Culture

Brussels has an unusual claim to cultural importance through comic books. Belgian bande dessinée — the Franco-Belgian tradition that produced Tintin, the Smurfs, and Lucky Luke — is taken seriously as an art form here, and the city has a dedicated comics museum in a beautiful Art Nouveau building. Murals depicting comic-book characters are painted on walls across the city as part of a long-running program, turning the streets into an outdoor gallery. It is a genuinely distinctive cultural identity that sits alongside the grand museums without embarrassment.

Nightlife and Electronic Music

Brussels has a serious and long-standing electronic music scene. The city's clubs, particularly those in former industrial spaces south of the canal, have built international reputations for the consistency of their programming and the quality of their sound systems. The scene sits alongside a broader nightlife culture centered on the bars of the Ixelles Ponds and Saint-Gilles, which run late and informally in a way that reflects the city's relaxed attitude to the distinction between a neighbourhood bar and a night out.

Art Nouveau, the Comic Strip Route and Brussels's Design Heritage

Brussels contains the largest concentration of Art Nouveau architecture in the world, produced during the decade from 1893 to 1903 when the city was the center of the international Art Nouveau movement and its most influential practitioners — Victor Horta, Paul Hankar, and Gustave Strauven — were transforming the residential streets of the commune of Saint-Gilles, Ixelles, and the inner suburbs. The Horta Museum in the former house and studio of Victor Horta in Saint-Gilles, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is the most important Art Nouveau interior surviving in its original condition, with ironwork, stained glass, mosaics, and furniture integrated into a total design environment of extraordinary coherence. The ADAM Design Museum at Tour et Taxis, presenting Belgian plastic arts and design from the postwar period through the Sixties to the present, and the Comic Strip Center in the former Waucquez department store designed by Horta, document the breadth of Brussels's creative output beyond the canonical Art Nouveau period. The Comic Strip Route through the city, where over 50 large-format murals painted on building gable ends depict characters from Belgian comics — from Tintin and Astérix to Lucky Luke and the Smurfs — is a free outdoor gallery that reflects Belgium's genuine claim to have produced the most internationally influential comic strip tradition in Europe.

The Atomium, Laeken and Brussels's Modernist Heritage

The Atomium, built for the 1958 World's Fair and representing a unit cell of an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times, is the most immediately recognisable structure in Brussels and one of the most distinctive modernist monuments in Europe. Its interior galleries, accessible by lift through the interconnected spheres, house exhibitions on the 1958 Universal Exhibition and on atomic optimism as a cultural phenomenon of the postwar decades, in a building whose maintenance and restoration has given it a new life as a functioning museum rather than a decaying relic. The Mini-Europe park at the base of the Atomium presents 1:25 scale reproductions of the most famous monuments in EU member states in a format that has operated continuously since 1989. The Royal Domain of Laeken, the residence of the Belgian royal family north of the city center, opens its greenhouses — the most extensive royal glasshouse complex in Europe, built in the Moorish, Chinese, and Japanese styles by Alphonse Balat for Leopold II — to the public for three weeks each spring when the camellias and azaleas are in bloom, in a visit that draws over 100,000 visitors in its brief annual opening and is one of the most eagerly anticipated seasonal events in the Belgian cultural calendar.