Brussels to Bruges is an hour. The list still takes weeks.
Which chocolate workshop lets you temper your own bar. Which Bruges boat leaves from the quiet quay. What a Trappist tasting costs and how long the good ones run. Every tour in Belgium, read and ranked.
The beer list in Belgium is longer than the menu.
Trappist ales brewed inside working abbeys, lambic soured by wild yeast in the Zenne valley, chocolate tempered on a marble slab while you watch, and a waffle that is a different object in Brussels and in Liège. Most of it is bookable as a two-hour walk with a glass in your hand.
What a day out in Belgium actually costs.
Per-person prices, sorted into four rungs. Belgium starts cheaper than most of western Europe: a self-guided Old Town walk costs less than the beer at the end of it.
Museum and landmark tickets, self-guided Old Town walks, a chocolate museum with tastings at the end.
The workhorse band: guided city walks, canal boats, beer tastings, and the Bruges-and-Ghent day trip out of Brussels.
Chocolate workshops where you make and keep the bars, longer tasting walks, day trips that cross a border and come back.
Small groups, private guides and the long days - food walks that run to four stops, and drivers who wait.
Products sold at a flat rate per group sit outside this ladder - they are not comparable per head.
Belgium’s four Old Towns are an hour apart by train.
Brussels and Bruges carry most of what is bookable in Belgium; Ghent and Antwerp are smaller but not thin. Pick a base, then fill the days.
What everyone actually books in Belgium.
Every review →Ordered by how many travellers have been and left a verdict. The Atomium ticket and the Bruges-and-Ghent day trip are a long way clear of everything else.
1
Brussels: Atomium Entry Ticket with Design Museum Ticket
Atomium and Design Museum Brussels in one ticket, with 360-degree views, sound-and-light shows, Belgian design exhibits, and a smartphone game.
From · $19
Read our review →2
From Brussels: Guided Day Trip to Bruges and Ghent
from $55
3
From Brussels: Bruges & Ghent Day Tour – 2 Fairytale Cities
from $57
4
Ghent: 50-Minute Medieval Center Guided Boat Trip
from $12
5
Choco-Story Brussels: Chocolate Museum Entrance with Tasting
from $18
6
Bruges and Ghent – Belgium’s Fairytale Cities – from Brussels
from $59
7
Bruges: Small Group Boat Cruise and Guided Walking Tour
from $51
8
Brussels: Hop-On Hop-Off Bus Tour
from $29
In Belgium, the city itself is the escape room.
Belgian operators have turned the Old Towns into puzzle boards: an app, a starting square and two hours of riddles that walk you past everything a guide would have shown you anyway. They start whenever you like, they cost a few dollars a head, and they carry on in the rain.
By city - where the trains stop
Brussels298 tours
Bruges180 tours
Ghent88 tours
Antwerp72 tours
Liège15 tours- Ypres (Ieper)12 tours
Dinant7 tours- Every review →
By kind of day - what are you in the mood for?
Ghent has the castle. Antwerp has the diamonds and the station.
Gravensteen sits in the middle of Ghent behind a moat, with twenty thousand students in the streets around it. Antwerp is the bigger, harder-edged one: Rubens’ house, the diamond quarter behind Central Station, and a railway hall that gets photographed more than the cathedral does.
- 1Ghent: 50-Minute Medieval Center Guided Boat Tripfrom $12
- 2Historical Walking Tour: Legends of Gentfrom $3
- 3Ghent: 40 Minute Medieval Center Guided Boat Tourfrom $12
Trappist beer, tempered chocolate, cut diamonds: Belgium’s three trades.
Every country has walking tours. These three are industries Belgium happens to lead, and all three let visitors in.
Trappist and Lambic
Only a handful of breweries anywhere may put Trappist on a label, and Belgium holds five of them. Separately, in the Zenne valley south-west of Brussels, lambic is still fermented by whatever wild yeast blows through the window - no pitched culture at all - then blended into gueuze, or steeped with cherries for kriek. A tasting flight is the cheapest way to understand why one costs three times the other.
- 1Bruges: Guided Tour & Boat Ride with Optional Beer Tasting★★★★★★★★★★ 4.4 · 3,894 reviews
- 2Belgian Beer Tasting in Brussels★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 1,280 reviews
- 3Bruges: Belgian Waffle-Making Workshop with Beer Tasting★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 960 reviews
The Chocolate Workshop
A Belgian praline is a shell of tempered chocolate around a ganache, and tempering is the whole craft: heat, cool, reheat, until the cocoa butter sets the one way that snaps instead of smearing. Workshops in Brussels and Bruges run two to three hours, put a marble slab in front of you, and send you off with the box you filled.
- 1Brussels: Belgian Chocolate Making Workshop with Tastings★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 1,629 reviews
- 2Brussels: 2.5-Hour Belgian Chocolate Making Workshop★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 933 reviews
- 3Belgian Chocolate Workshop in Bruges★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 660 reviews
The Diamond Quarter
Four streets behind Antwerp Central Station handle a large share of the world’s rough diamonds, and have done since the sixteenth century. It is a working trade district - offices, safes, couriers, brokers who have known each other for decades - and not a spectacle. The tours that go in explain grading, cutting and how a stone is actually priced.
- 1Private Antwerp’s Diamonds and Jewellery Old City Center Historic Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 25 reviews
- 2Ticket to Diamond Museum in Bruges★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 14 reviews
- 3Bruges: Diamond Museum Ticket with Polishing Demonstration★★★★★★★★★★ 3.9 · 8 reviews
Flanders Fields, Ypres and the Ardennes.
Belgium holds two of the twentieth century’s battlefields. The Ypres Salient in the west, where the front barely moved for four years, and the Ardennes in the south-east, where the last German offensive of the Second World War stalled in the snow around Bastogne.
What is bookable here is guided visits to cemeteries, preserved trenches, mine craters and museums. The Last Post is sounded under the Menin Gate at eight every evening; that is a commemoration, not a performance, and there is no ticket for it.
- Flanders Fields and the WWI battlefields
- Battle of the Bulge, in the Ardennes
- Ypres (Ieper) and the villages around it
Departures are mostly from Bruges, Brussels and Ypres itself. Most run a full day.
It rains in Belgium in every month of the year. Book indoors.
The North Sea sends weather across Flanders all year round, and a Bruges canal in horizontal drizzle is a short outing. The useful part is that most of what Belgium is known for happens under a roof: a chocolate workshop, a brewery cellar, a museum, or a city game you can play from a café table when it gets heavy.
A first week in Belgium, in five stops.
BrusselsNewly reviewed in Brussels, Bruges and beyond.
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