Ghent

Ghent, known in Dutch as Gent and in French as Gand, occupies a singular place among the urban centres of northern Europe. Rising where the Rivers Scheldt and Leie meet, it has borne witness to the unfolding of Flemish history for more than a millennium. By the year 1300, it had grown into one of the continent’s great cities, home to some fifty thousand inhabitants—making it, after Paris, the second largest urban settlement north of the Alps. Its medieval prosperity, founded on cloth production and riverine trade, endowed it with a wealth of civic architecture and a civic pride that endures in the form of its imposing towers, castle walls, and merchant houses.

Over the centuries, Ghent’s fortunes have waxed and waned. In the late sixteenth century, political turmoil and shifting trade routes dimmed its radiance. Yet this gradual eclipse shielded its historic centre from the sweeping modernisation that erased so many medieval towns elsewhere. As a result, today’s visitor encounters an exceptionally well-preserved urban core, free of intrusive road traffic and punctuated by churches, guildhalls, and the great belfry that first rang out its autonomy in the fourteenth century.

Administratively, the municipality of Ghent extends well beyond its car-free heart. In 2024 it counted 270,473 inhabitants, making it Belgium’s second most populous commune after Antwerp. Its boundaries enclose not only the city proper but a dozen suburbs—among them Drongen to the west, Mariakerke and Ledeberg to the south, and Oostakker to the east. On the outskirts lie nature reserves such as the Bourgoyen-Ossemeersen wetlands and the Blaarmeersen recreation park, which together offer nearly 320 hectares of green space. More widely, the metropolitan area stretches across some 1,205 square kilometres and encompasses over half a million people.

Demographically, Ghent reflects a blend of tradition and change. Its status as a university city—home to Ghent University’s historic Book Tower and a constellation of research institutes—yields a sizeable seasonal student population. Yet students are but one facet of its populace. Professionals employed by multinational firms, artists drawn by an atmosphere of openness, and long-standing immigrant communities together shape a social texture both tolerant and cosmopolitan. In the 2020 census, over one-third of residents traced their origins beyond Belgian borders, and more than fifteen per cent held a non-Belgian nationality. Certain neighbourhoods—particularly Brugse Poort, Dampoort, and Rabot—have long been the loci of this cultural diversity.

The architectural heritage of Ghent remains its foremost claim to attention. At the city’s core stand four towers: the roman-gothic St. Nicholas’ Church, the soaring belfry with its adjacent cloth hall, the baroque spire of St. Michael’s Church, and the eclectic façade of St. Bavo’s Cathedral. Within the latter, under vaulting of stone and rib, rests the renowned altarpiece “The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb,” painted by Hubert and Jan van Eyck in 1432. A masterpiece of oil technique and theological nuance, it continues to draw scholars and pilgrims alike, even as conservation work proceeds behind glass in the chapel.

Not far away, the Gravensteen—the Castle of the Counts—retains its crenellated donjon and thick walls, reminders of a martial age when the count of Flanders could enforce his will with sword and torture chamber. For many centuries it stood neglected, only to be restored in the nineteenth century by civic authorities determined to preserve a formative symbol of Ghent’s medieval autonomy. Today its ramparts afford panoramic views over red-tiled roofs and the distant spires of a city that has long since left its swords behind.

Yet Ghent is far from a static museum. Its historic streets have accommodated modern life without compromise. In the nineteenth century, Louis Roelandt shaped the opera house and main courthouse in neoclassical lines, while Henry Van de Velde’s Boekentoren introduced early modernism to the university district. Most recently, De Krook—the new central library and media centre—has provided a fluid, glass-walled nexus of learning and digital innovation. Equally noteworthy is the Zebrastraat social-housing project, in which a former textile site has become an experimental quarter uniting living, work, and culture.

Within its museums, Ghent offers a panorama of both past and present. The Museum of Fine Arts (MSK) houses paintings by Bosch, Rubens, and their contemporaries, set amid rooms designed to evoke the old citadel park. Nearby, the SMAK displays cutting-edge contemporary works, from Joseph Beuys installations to Warhol prints. The Design Museum Gent surveys a century of Belgian and international design, from Henry Van de Velde’s furniture to avant-garde prototyping. The city museum STAM, installed in the Bijloke Abbey, employs interactive displays and over three hundred artefacts to narrate Ghent’s evolution from medieval powerhouse to cosmopolitan capital.

Theatre has its champions in Ghent as well. NTGent, the public theatre company known for bold, experimental productions, inhabits the Koninklijke Nederlandse Schouwburg, a nineteenth-century playhouse, while also staging works across the city. Film lovers mark their calendars for the International Film Festival of Ghent, which each autumn presents new cinema and awards the World Soundtrack Awards. Every five years, the Floralia botanical exhibition transforms Flanders Expo into a temporary wonderland of flowers, while the Festival of Flanders brings classical and contemporary music to squares, churches, and unconventional venues.

Yet it is the Gentse Feesten, the ten-day festival each July, that most profoundly animates the city. Originating in 1969, the event now draws well over a million visitors to free concerts, street performances, and communal feasting. Though it paused during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, Ghent’s streets rejoiced in its return in the summer of 2022, reaffirming this collective ritual of music and conviviality.

No account of Ghent would be complete without mention of its culinary traditions. In patisseries across the city one finds the mastel, a ring-shaped bun blessed each November 3rd on the feast day of Saint Hubert. Conical cuberdons—so-called “little noses”—sit deep purple and filled with jelly, while babelutten offer a brittle butterscotch bite. The mustard of Tierenteyn, tangy and coarse, stands apart in a local pantheon, rivalled only by the city’s famous praline chocolates. Local kitchens cherish heavier fare as well: stoverij, a beef stew enriched with abbey beer, and waterzooi, once a fish stew but now more often made with chicken, both served traditionally with crisp fries.

In recognition of environmental concerns, Ghent instituted a weekly meat-free Thursday in public canteens and schools, encouraging vegetarian options and issuing “veggie street maps” to guide diners to plant-based menus. This gesture reflects a broader civic ethos: careful stewardship of heritage alongside progressive social and environmental policies.

Green space penetrates the urban fabric. The Bourgoyen-Ossemeersen nature reserve offers wetland trails and bird-watching hides, while Blaarmeersen provides lake-side leisure, swimming beaches, and watersports. Smaller parks, often surrounding former religious sites, give hillside béguinages—such as the medieval Saint Elisabeth beguinage—room to breathe.

Ghent’s economy remains anchored in its port, the third largest in Belgium. Via the Ghent–Terneuzen Canal, oceangoing vessels reach the quays where steel, automobiles, and paper products are loaded and unloaded. Major firms—ArcelorMittal, Volvo, Honda—have established facilities here, alongside high-tech clusters fostered by the university’s spin-offs: biotech firms such as Ablynx and CropDesign, pharmaceutical research by Bayer CropScience. Tourism, too, has grown into a major employer, sustained by the city’s aura of history and its lively cultural calendar.

Transport links reinforce Ghent’s centrality. Two motorways, the E40 (running east to Brussels and west to Bruges and Ostend) and the E17 (north to Antwerp, south to Kortrijk and Lille), frame the urban perimeter. Within, two ring roads—the R4 and R40—channel through-traffic around the city centre and link suburban villages. Rail travellers arrive at Gent-Sint-Pieters, a hub served by high-speed intercity trains to Brussels, Antwerp, and Lille, while regional stations at Dampoort, Gentbrugge, Wondelgem, and Drongen knit Ghent to East Flanders’ towns.

Locally, the public transport network of trams and buses, operated by De Lijn, has recently expanded. Since January 2024, four tram lines sweep through the city, connecting Flanders Expo, the university hospital (UZ-Gent), suburban termini, and key squares. Eleven bus routes complement the trams, reaching neighbourhoods north, east, and south. Regional and international coaches depart chiefly from Dampoort, serving Belgian cities and European capitals alike, and airport-link services travel between Sint-Pieters Station and Brussels’ two airports.

Perhaps most remarkable is Ghent’s embrace of the bicycle. Over 400 kilometres of cycle paths and a pioneering “bicycle boulevard” network place cyclists at the top of the urban hierarchy, with cars relegated to guest status. In a single weekend in 2017, the city reconfigured traffic circulation on some eighty streets and replaced over two thousand road signs to favour bicycles, doubling its car-free zone. At Gent-Sint-Pieters Station, plans call for 17,000 bicycle parking spaces, reflecting the city’s conviction that sustainable mobility and urban heritage are compatible.

In all its facets—historic and contemporary, architectural and social, cultural and economic—Ghent embodies a balance between preservation and innovation. Here, a medieval cloth town palpably inhabits the twenty-first century, its stone towers reflected in rivers that have borne barges of grain and steel, and its scholarship and industry advancing new fields of inquiry. To walk its car-free lanes is to sense the weight of history without being consigned to a museum; to join its festivals is to participate in a living civic ritual. Ghent remains, in every respect, a city both of memory and of renewal.