Haunted Bruges: Legends & Ghost Stories

Étapes de la visite

1. 1. Bruges by Boat

   Step aboard for the view Bruges was built to be seen from. 🛥️ The canals were the city's working arteries when it was one of northern Europe's great trading ports, and the boats still pass under bridges laid down in the Middle Ages. From the water you see the backs of the houses — the parts nobody tidied up for visitors.

2. 2. Lake of Love (Minnewater)

   Lake of Love (Minnewater)

3. 3. Saint John's Hospital (Sint-Janshospitaal)

   One of the oldest surviving hospital buildings in Europe, taking in the sick from the twelfth century onwards. 🏥 It is a museum now, and its old ward holds six paintings by Hans Memling, made for this very building. The pharmacy is still fitted out as it was, jars and all.

4. 4. The Old Chocolate House

   A good stop for the thing Belgium is best at. 🍫 Bruges has more chocolate shops per resident than almost anywhere, a legacy of the port and the sugar that came through it. Buy a few pieces loose rather than a box; it is cheaper and you get to choose.

5. 5. Market Square (Markt)

   Market Square (Markt)

6. 6. Bruges Beer Museum Bar

   Belgium brews several hundred distinct beers, and this is a reasonable place to start on them. 🍻 Ask what is Belgian and on tap rather than ordering by name — the local pours are the ones worth your time. Each beer comes in its own glass, and that is not a gimmick: the shape is part of how it is meant to taste.

7. 7. Burg Square (Burg)

   Burg Square (Burg)

8. 8. Basilica of the Holy Blood (Basiliek van het Heilig Bloed)

   The basilica keeps a rock-crystal vial said to hold a cloth stained with the blood of Christ, brought back from the Holy Land in the twelfth century. 🩸 It is brought out for veneration daily, and carried through the streets each Ascension Day in a procession the city has held for some seven hundred years. The lower chapel is plain, dark Romanesque; the upper one, reached by a staircase, is a complete contrast.

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