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Brussels spent years living down a reputation as Europe's dullest capital, and the city has quietly made the label look foolish. Its heart is one of the most complete old squares in Europe, rebuilt by the city's guilds in four years after a French army shelled it to rubble in 1695. A little bronze boy has been peeing into a fountain on a nearby corner for four hundred years. A 102-metre iron crystal, left over from a World's Fair, watches the northern skyline. Add Art Nouveau town houses, a wall of comic-strip murals and some of the best beer and chocolate on the continent, and the dull-capital line falls apart.
We at Travelmyth, the hotel search engine that ranks stays by your interests and needs across 60 stay categories, have put together this guide to what is genuinely worth your time in Brussels. It runs from the obvious to the easily missed: the Grand-Place and Manneken Pis, the Atomium and the Galeries Royales, the Magritte Museum and the comic-strip walls, the Sablon and the European Quarter. Two of these, the Atomium and Manneken Pis, have their own full guides, linked below; everything else is here. The good news for a first visit is that the historic centre is compact and very walkable, though some routes climb toward the upper town, with most of the sights within ten to twenty minutes of each other on foot.
If you start anywhere in Brussels, start on the Grand-Place (Dutch: Grote Markt). The square has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1998, and the story of how it looks today is the story of a single catastrophe: on 13 August 1695 a French army under Marshal de Villeroy bombarded the city for some thirty-six hours, levelling most of the centre. Only the Town Hall's facade and tower were left standing, and the guilds rebuilt their houses around it within four years, which is why the square is at once so varied and so harmonious.
The Town Hall (Hotel de Ville), whose facade and tower were the great survivors of the bombardment, is still the centrepiece. It was begun in 1401 and completed in 1455, its 96-metre spire, a pinnacle of Brabantine Gothic, attributed to Jan van Ruysbroeck, topped by a statue of Saint Michael. Facing it across the square is the Maison du Roi, the "King's House", rebuilt in its current neo-Gothic form in the late 19th century; it was once the bread market, which is why locals still call it the Broodhuis ("Bread House"), and today it holds the Brussels City Museum. Every second year in August, the cobbles disappear under an enormous flower carpet.
A five-minute walk south of the Grand-Place, on the corner of Rue de l'Etuve, stands the most famous and most surprising sight in Brussels: Manneken Pis, a bronze statue of a small boy peeing into a fountain that is barely 55.5 centimetres tall. Most visitors are taken aback by how small it is. The original, conceived by the sculptor Jerome Duquesnoy the Elder and commissioned in 1619, has been kept in the Brussels City Museum since 1966; the figure on the street is a copy.
What turns a small fountain into a four-hundred-year-old icon is the wardrobe: Manneken Pis owns more than a thousand costumes and is dressed several times a week on a published schedule. There is a museum dedicated entirely to the outfits. We have put the full story, the legends, the costume tradition, the two companion statues most visitors never find, into a dedicated guide: read Manneken Pis, Brussels: The story behind the little peeing statue.
On the Heysel plateau to the north of the centre, the Atomium is the other great symbol of Brussels: nine stainless-steel-clad spheres held in the shape of an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times, standing 102 metres high. It was built as the centrepiece of the 1958 World's Fair (Expo 58) and was only meant to last six months; the city liked it too much to take it down. At its foot is Mini-Europe, a park of around 350 models of European landmarks at 1:25 scale, opened in 1989.
The Atomium rewards a proper visit, the spheres, the panoramic top, the history of the fair, and it has its own full guide, including the live 2026 tickets and how to get there: read The Atomium, Brussels: History, tickets and how to visit.
Between the Grand-Place and the cathedral, the Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert are a landmark of the 19th-century covered shopping arcade tradition. Designed by the architect Jean-Pierre Cluysenaar and inaugurated on 20 June 1847 by King Leopold I, the 213-metre glass-roofed gallery runs in three sections, the King's, the Queen's and the Princes' galleries, and is among the oldest covered arcades in Europe, older than Milan's. It is still lined with chocolatiers, bookshops and cafes, and it is one of the best places in the city to shelter from a shower.
The Mont des Arts, the “Hill of the Arts”, is the terraced link between the lower and upper town. The first garden here was created for the 1910 Universal Exhibition, while today’s geometric garden belongs to the mid-20th-century redevelopment of the area, associated with the landscape architect René Pechère. From the top, the spire of the Town Hall on the Grand-Place lines up neatly below you, and the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) stands alongside.
A short walk up on the Place Royale is the Magritte Museum, opened in 2009 in the neoclassical Hôtel du Lotto. It holds the world’s largest collection of René Magritte’s work and forms part of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.
Halfway up the slope between the lower and upper town, the Cathedral of St Michael and St Gudula is the national church of Belgium and one of the finest examples of Brabantine Gothic. It was begun as a collegiate church in 1226 and took more than 250 years to complete, with the Gothic building essentially finished around 1480; its two great towers each rise to 64 metres. It is dedicated to the city's two patron saints, and royal weddings and state funerals are still held under its vaults. It became a co-cathedral in 1962.
At the top of the hill, facing the green rectangle of Brussels Park (the Parc de Bruxelles), stands the Royal Palace. It is the King’s official palace rather than his home; the royal family lives out at Laeken, while the palace is used for state functions and receptions. For a few weeks each summer, in 2026 from 3 July to 16 August, it opens to the public by timed ticket, with paid admission for visitors aged 13 and over. The highlight is the Hall of Mirrors, whose ceiling carries Jan Fabre’s “Heaven of Delight”, a green shimmer made of more than a million jewel-beetle wing cases.
East of the centre, the Parc du Cinquantenaire (Dutch: Jubelpark) was laid out in 1880 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Belgian independence, with its triple triumphal arch completed and inaugurated in 1905. The arch is the photogenic part, but the wings on either side hold three substantial museums, Autoworld, with its collection of vintage cars; the Royal Museum of the Armed Forces and Military History; and the Art and History Museum, which makes the park an easy half-day if the weather turns.
Belgium gave the world Tintin, the Smurfs and a national reverence for the comic strip, and Brussels wears it on its walls. The Belgian Comic Strip Center occupies a 1906 Art Nouveau former fabric warehouse designed by Victor Horta and opened as a museum in 1989. Out on the streets, a mural trail begun in 1991 has grown to more than 80 painted gable ends, from Tintin and the Smurfs to lesser-known Franco-Belgian heroes; tracking them down is a free and pleasant way to wander the lower town.
The Sablon is the city's antiques and chocolate quarter, gathered around the Gothic Church of Our Lady of the Sablon and the elegant little Petit Sablon garden, whose railing carries 48 statues of the old craft guilds; an antiques market fills the Grand Sablon each weekend. The wider city is also the birthplace of Art Nouveau: Victor Horta (1861-1947) built his own house and studio here between 1898 and 1901, now the Horta Museum in Saint-Gilles, and several of his town houses are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Brussels is the de facto capital of the European Union, and its institutions cluster east of the Cinquantenaire. The most recognisable building is the X-shaped Berlaymont, home of the European Commission; nearby, the European Parliament runs the Parlamentarium, a free visitor centre with an exhibition in 24 languages, and the House of European History sits in the green of Parc Leopold. It is a quarter of glass and flags rather than gables, but worth an hour if the EU story interests you.
A few more sights reward the curious. The Palais de Justice, designed by Joseph Poelaert and inaugurated in 1883, looms over the working-class Marolles district and is one of the largest court buildings in the world (it has spent years under restoration scaffolding). The Musical Instruments Museum (the MIM) fills the wrought-iron Old England building of 1899 and shows around 1,200 instruments from a collection of about 10,000. And out beyond the centre, the Royal Greenhouses of Laeken, a glass-and-iron complex begun in the 1870s for Leopold II, open to the public for around three weeks each spring, in April and May.
You cannot write about Brussels without the beer and the chocolate. The Delirium Cafe holds a Guinness World Record for a beer list of more than two thousand brands, and the filled Belgian praline was invented here, by Jean Neuhaus Jr. in 1912, which is why the Galeries Royales and the Sablon are still ringed with chocolatiers. Sample widely, and do not feel obliged to choose.
A good deal of the best of Brussels costs nothing. The Grand-Place, Manneken Pis, the comic-strip murals, the Mont des Arts view, Petit Sablon garden, the city parks and the nave of the cathedral are all free, and many museums waive entry on the first Sunday of the month. For weather, the kindest months are the shoulder seasons, roughly April to June and September to October, when the city is mild and the queues are short. Wrap up for the Christmas markets if you come in December; bring a raincoat whenever you come.
Brussels is also a fast base for the rest of Belgium. Bruges, with its canals and belfry, is about an hour away by train; Ghent pairs a medieval core with a younger, livelier edge; and Antwerp adds a great cathedral, a Rubens house and Belgium's diamond trade. The Napoleonic battlefield of Waterloo lies a short ride south for the history-minded. Each deserves its own day, and its own guide in time.
Where you stay shapes the trip: the streets around the Grand-Place put you in the middle of the old town, while the leafier Ixelles and the European Quarter trade the bustle for a calmer base. On Travelmyth's Brussels pages you can filter the city's stays across 60 categories, from boutique-style properties to stays taking steps towards sustainability, and combine any two to find the right fit for you.