Ghent charges nothing for most of what makes it Ghent: a UNESCO béguinage you walk straight into, an alley repainted every morning, and every city museum free on the first Sunday. Add €3 frites and €2.50 student pints and three days stay cheap.
A walled village of whitewashed 17th-century houses around a baroque church, UNESCO-listed and still lived in today. The gate on Lange Violettestraat opens roughly 06:30-22:00 daily and entry costs nothing — residents hang laundry between the almshouses.
Ghent's legally sanctioned graffiti lane, a narrow 60-metre passage between Hoogpoort and Onderstraat that has been repainted almost daily since 1995. Bring a can and you may legally add your own layer to walls now centimetres thick with paint.
The square where Ghent's guilds rioted for five centuries, ringed by the red-brick socialist Ons Huis building and guarded by Dulle Griet, a 16-tonne 15th-century supergun that cracked on its first firing and never moved again.
A 24-hectare 1870s park laid out over a demolished Dutch fortress, with an artificial rock grotto, a bandstand and the ruined colonnade of a lost casino. Open around the clock, unfenced and free, with grass banks that fill with students at dusk.
Ghent's flea market runs Friday to Sunday from about 08:00 to 13:00 across the squares around Sint-Jacobskerk: house clearances, Belgian comics, enamel signs and boxes of lace. Haggling is expected and most small finds land between €1 and €5.
A tiny student-run frituur double-frying in beef fat, with more than thirty sauces and a vegan stoofvlees that regulars order over the meat one. A small cone is around €3 and a large with sauce stays under €5. Cash moves the queue faster.
The old vegetable market square, still home to Tierenteyn-Verlent, an 1818 shop ladling fierce mustard from an oak barrel into stoneware pots. A refill jar runs about €3, and the Groot Vleeshuis hall opposite hands out free East Flanders tastings.
The drinking street running south from Sint-Pietersplein, where a dozen cafés pour half-litre Jupiler from around €2.50 during term. Nothing opens before 20:00, and chip vans at the top of the street keep feeding the queues until dawn.
Henry van de Velde's 1936 book tower, 64 metres of raw concrete above the university library. The top-floor belvedere reopened after restoration in 2023 and looks straight along the three medieval towers. Entry is timed and slots sell out days ahead.
A 230-hectare floodplain reserve three kilometres west of the centre, reached free along the Leie towpath or on bus 14. Six waymarked trails cross reedbeds where around 250 bird species have been recorded; the visitor centre and hides cost nothing.
The city's contemporary art museum in the Citadelpark, holding Broodthaers, Beuys and Tuymans in a converted 1940s casino hall. Standard entry is €12, but every Ghent city museum opens free on the first Sunday of the month, and under-19s enter free daily.
The marina where the Leie meets the Scheldt, rebuilt in 2003 from a dock the city had filled in with rubble. The quays and their steps are free to sit on, the 1886 Van Eyck swimming baths next door charge around €4, and the sun sets down the channel.