Ghent spent the Middle Ages picking fights with its own rulers and usually losing. This route follows the belfry strongbox that guarded the city's charters, the abbey Charles V flattened in revenge, the begijnhof that outlived them all, and the mills that made Ghent the Manchester of the continent.
The 91m belfry begun in 1313 held Ghent's charters in the Secreet, a strongbox behind three locks. A glass lift climbs past the 54-bell carillon to the copper dragon; the 1741 Mammelokker doorway shows Cimon nursed by his daughter.
Ghent's covered meat hall, built 1407-1419, forced all butchery under one roof so magistrates could tax and inspect it. The oak roof survives intact, the side chapel and pauper's stalls remain, and East Flemish charcuterie is still sold inside.
Founded in the 7th century by St Amand, burned by the Vikings in 879, then rebuilt as a Benedictine power that owned much of Ghent until French revolutionaries suppressed it in 1796. Refectory, crypt and ruins sit behind a working vineyard.
The abbey Charles V demolished in 1540 to plant a Spanish fortress on Ghent after the city refused his war taxes. The Romanesque refectory, octagonal lavabo and 12th-century chapterhouse stand roofless among Gallo-Roman tombstones.
Set in the 14th-century Bijloke abbey, STAM walks a thousand years of Ghent over a 300m² floor-sized aerial photo, from Viking raids to the 1913 World Fair and postwar demolition plans. The nuns' dormitory keeps its Gothic wall paintings.
The square where guilds swore oaths and where Bad Monday in May 1345 left hundreds of weavers and fullers dead in a single afternoon. Van Artevelde's 1863 statue points toward England, source of the wool that fed the city.
Five floors of a riverside cotton mill telling how Lieven Bauwens smuggled a British spinning mule into Ghent in 1798 and turned it into the Manchester of the continent. Mule jenny and letterpress machines are run for visitors.
Built in 1913 as the palace of Ghent's socialist cooperative — cinema, ballroom and café paid for with workers' bread coupons — requisitioned by both occupying armies, then rescued by students in 1982 after years of decay.
Founded in 1235 under Joanna of Constantinople and still inhabited, this walled village of whitewashed convent houses and a 1720 Baroque church survived both the French suppression and 20th-century developers. UNESCO-listed since 1998.
The knot of lanes behind the Count's Castle where medieval leather workers lived, taken over by Carmelite friars in 1272, sunk into Ghent's worst slum by 1900 and saved from planned demolition by residents in the 1980s.
A 1363 almshouse the Alijn family was ordered to build as penance for a double murder in the Rijke Klaren church. Its cottages and chapel now hold everyday 20th-century life: home movies, mourning cards, kitchen radios, fairground prizes.
The vanished 300-room palace where Charles V was born in 1500 and where Philip the Good staged the Golden Fleece. Only the Donkere Poort gate and street names — Purgatory Alley, the Lion's Court — survive of the Burgundian court.