Budget · 3-hour walk · Brussels
The Grand-Place and the arcades in three hours
The guild square, the small statue, Europe's first shopping arcade, and the museum hill.
Brussels rewards a short walk and punishes a long one: the medieval core is beautiful and about four streets wide, and the 19th-century city around it is mostly offices. This route stays inside the core and climbs once, to the Mont des Arts, where the view back over the lower town is the best in the city.
The route, stop by stop
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Grand-Place
A guildhall square in gilded baroque, rebuilt after a French bombardment in 1695. Every August in even years it is carpeted in begonias.
30 min here Walk here → -
Manneken Pis
Sixty-one centimetres tall and permanently surrounded. He has a wardrobe of over a thousand costumes, changed on a published schedule.
10 min here Walk here → -
Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert
Opened in 1847, a decade before Milan's and the first glazed shopping arcade in Europe.
25 min here Walk here → -
Mont des Arts
A formal garden on a slope with the spire of the town hall lined up in the view down over the lower town.
25 min here Walk here → -
St Michael and St Gudula Cathedral
Four hundred years in the building, with 16th-century stained glass that survived both wars intact.
25 min here Walk here →
More in Brussels
Every walking route in Brussels, or the full Brussels guide for where to stay and what a day costs.