Brussels hides its history underground and behind facades: a Habsburg palace buried beneath a square, a river bricked over in 1871, a medieval city gate marooned in traffic. Three days tracing the city from marshland settlement to imperial capital.
Underground remains of the palace of Charles V, destroyed by fire in 1731 and buried under Place Royale in 1775. Walk the Rue Isabelle and the vaulted Aula Magna cellars. Tue-Fri 09:30-17:00, weekends 10:00-18:00.
Begun in 1226 on the site of a 9th-century chapel, finished around 1519. The Romanesque crypt of the earlier church survives beneath the choir, and the 16th-century Habsburg stained glass shows Charles V kneeling.
The sole surviving gate of Brussels's second city wall, built 1381 and spared demolition only because it served as a prison and then a grain store. Now a museum of the medieval fortifications with a rooftop walkway.
An 11th-century tower of the first Brussels wall, now wedged between a hotel and Sainte-Catherine church. Further fragments survive on Rue de Villers and Rue de Rollebeek, marking the 13th-century circuit.
Twenty kilometres south, the field where Napoleon lost on 18 June 1815. The 43-metre Lion's Mound (1826) is 226 steps up; the Memorial 1815 museum sits underground beside it, with the 1912 panorama rotunda.
Joseph Poelaert's 1866-83 courthouse, larger in footprint than St. Peter's in Rome. Three thousand homes in the Marolles were demolished to build it — locals still use 'architek' as an insult. Under scaffolding since 1984.
Leopold II's colonial showcase, opened 1910 and closed 2013-2018 for a reckoning with its own contents. The new underground entrance forces visitors past the old propaganda statuary now quarantined in a basement gallery.
Laid out by Leopold II for the 1880 golden jubilee of Belgian independence; the arch itself was only finished in 1905, funded from Congo Free State revenues. The colonnades frame the Autoworld and army museum wings.
The SS assembly camp from which 25,484 Jews and Roma were deported to Auschwitz between 1942 and 1944. The memorial occupies the surviving barracks wing; the 2012 museum opposite holds the portrait wall of the deported.
The working-class quarter that resisted Leopold II's clearances. The flea market has run daily since 1873; Bruegel died on Rue Haute in 1569 and is buried in the Église Notre-Dame de la Chapelle a few streets north.
Victor Horta's first house, 1893 — the building where Art Nouveau began, a year before the more famous Hôtel Tassel. Restored by comic artist François Schuiten and open as a museum of 1900s bourgeois domestic life.
The river that made Brussels was vaulted over between 1867 and 1871 after cholera epidemics. The central boulevards trace its course; Place Sainte-Catherine's basin outline and the quays' names mark the vanished port.