Where to Stay in Antwerp, Flanders

What is Antwerp known for?

Antwerp is the second largest city in Belgium, a major European port, and the city the diamond trade runs through. Painting is the other trade. The Rubenshuis holds a painter's house and workshop, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp holds a national collection, and the Museum Plantin-Moretus holds the presses of a printing house that made the city a second fortune.

Museum aan de Stroom stands on the water beyond the old town, and MoMu - Fashion Museum Antwerp keeps the clothes.

What are the main landmarks in Antwerp?

Antwerp put its landmarks up in stone and then kept them. The Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal carries its Gothic tower over the old city, Antwerp City Hall faces the market square below it, and Het Steen holds the river approach. The Vleeshuis was the butchers' hall.

Carolus Borromeuskerk, St. Paul's Church and St. James' Church fill the parishes around them, while the Museum Plantin-Moretus keeps an entire printing house intact.

What is the history of Antwerp?

Antwerp is a river town that turned into a sea town, and the rest follows from that. Het Steen is the oldest part of the answer, a stone fortress put where ships had to pass it. The settlement behind the fortress raised the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal, and the trades raised their own halls beside it, the Vleeshuis for the butchers among them.

Cargo paid for all of it. A printing house grew rich enough on the traffic to leave the Museum Plantin-Moretus behind it, Rubens ran a workshop out of the building now called the Rubenshuis, and the Snijders&Rockox House still carries two collectors' names on one door. Antwerp shipped people as well as goods, and the Red Star Line Museum is what remains of that business.

Then the docks kept growing. They pushed the warehouses downstream and left a quarter that has since been rebuilt around Museum aan de Stroom, and they made the town the capital of Antwerp Province and one of the major ports of Europe. Diamonds arrived and stayed.

The Maagdenhuismuseum and the Letterenhuis keep the parts of the record that were never about cargo, and the cathedral tower still fixes the point the whole city was measured from.

Where is Antwerp?

Antwerp stands on the river in the Flemish Region of Belgium, inland of the sea and still one of Europe's major ports. The city is the capital of Antwerp Province and the third largest municipality in Belgium by area, which is why the built town and the docks read as two different places. Brussels lies south of it. The docks run north out of the old streets, and Het Steen marks the boundary the two sides still share.

What is the climate of Antwerp?

Antwerp sits in the temperate band, near enough to the sea that the weather arrives rather than forms, which is to say that the default setting is grey. Rain comes in short bursts through most of the year, and the wind carrying it up the river is what makes the quays under Het Steen colder than the sheltered lanes behind the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal. Midsummer evenings run long here.

How do you get to Antwerp?

Antwerp has been reached by water for as long as there has been an Antwerp, and the port is still the largest fact about arriving. Ships come up the river. Overland the city sits at the northern end of Flanders with Brussels below it, on the routes that cross the region rather than at the end of one, which is why so much of Belgium passes through without meaning to.

Trams and buses handle the ground inside the city, and the Vlaams Tram- en Autobusmuseum keeps the ones that handled it first.