🇧🇪 Belgium
Antwerp
Antwerp (Antwerpen in Dutch, Anvers in French — population 530,000 in the city, 1.2 million in the province — the second largest city in Belgium and the most important port city in Northern Europe) sits on the Scheldt River 88km from the sea and is one of the most historically significant cities in the world: in the 16th century (approximately 1500–1585), Antwerp was the most important commercial city in the Western world — the financial and trade center of the entire northern European economy, the city where Christopher Columbus's voyages were financed (by the Antwerp banking houses of Fugger and Welser), where the first stock exchange in the world was established in permanent premises (the Antwerp Beurs, 1531 — the first building built specifically for regular trading), where Rubens (the most prolific and commercially successful artist of the Flemish Baroque) was born, lived and died, and where Christophe Plantin established the most technologically advanced printing house in the world (the Plantin-Moretus Museum, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site). Antwerp's combination of the extraordinary Baroque heritage (the Cathedral of Our Lady with its four Rubens altarpieces, the Guild Houses on the Grote Markt, the Rubenshuis), the world-leading diamond trade (80% of the world's rough diamonds pass through Antwerp's diamond district — 500 trading companies, 2,000 diamond cutters in a 1km square around the Central Station), and the most vibrant fashion scene in Belgium (the Antwerp Six (1988) — the group of avant-garde Belgian designers including Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester and Walter Van Beirendonck who transformed global fashion from Antwerp) makes it the most surprisingly rich city in the Benelux.