Facts about Belgium
Capital Brussels · Europe
10 topics · about 20 minutes
Belgium is a small, densely populated federal kingdom on the North Sea, divided between Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north and French-speaking Wallonia in the south, with a small German-speaking community in the east. Brussels, officially bilingual, hosts the main institutions of the European Union and the headquarters of NATO, which makes a country of under 12 million people one of the busiest diplomatic capitals in the world.
The land rises gradually from a short sandy coastline through the flat polders and river plains of Flanders to the wooded hills of the Ardennes in the southeast, where the Signal de Botrange reaches 694 meters. The Scheldt and the Meuse are the two main rivers, and the Scheldt estuary makes Antwerp one of the largest ports in Europe despite sitting 80 kilometers inland.
Brussels is the capital and the seat of the federal government, the European Commission and Council, and NATO. Antwerp is the port and the center of the global diamond trade, Ghent and Bruges preserve the wealth of the medieval cloth towns in their canals and guildhalls, and Leuven and Liège anchor the university and industrial traditions of the two language regions. Most visitors concentrate on Bruges, Brussels, Ghent and the Flanders battlefields around Ypres.
- Population
- 11.8 million
- Area
- 30,689 km²
- Capital
- Brussels
- Currency
- Euro (EUR)
- Official languages
- Dutch, French, German
- Highest point
- Signal de Botrange, 694 m
The Belgium course
Geography of Belgium
Flat polders in the north, the wooded Ardennes in the south, and 67 kilometers of coast.
History of Belgium
Rich medieval cloth towns, independence in 1830, and a brutal private colony in the Congo.
Language of Belgium
A language border fixed by law in 1962, and a capital that is bilingual by statute.
Culture of Belgium
Flemish painting, surrealism, comics as a national art form, and beer with UNESCO status.
Economy of Belgium
A port, a chemicals cluster, the diamond trade, and an economy that lives on transit.
Politics of Belgium
Six governments for 11 million people, and a world record for going without a federal one.
Nature & Wildlife of Belgium
Peat bogs on the German border, beavers back on the Meuse, and a coast of shifting dunes.
Food & Cuisine of Belgium
Fries fried twice and sold from kiosks, mussels by the potful, and chocolate as a craft.
Landmarks of Belgium
A guildhall square Victor Hugo called the finest in Europe, and an atom built for a world fair.
People & Society of Belgium
Two societies with separate media and schools, sharing one crowded country.
Geography of Belgium
Belgium covers 30,689 square kilometers between France, the Netherlands, Germany and Luxembourg, with only 67 kilometers of North Sea coastline. It is among the most densely populated countries in Europe and one of the most heavily urbanised, with a near-continuous belt of towns running from Brussels through Antwerp, Ghent and Leuven.
The north is flat, low and partly reclaimed, protected by dunes and dykes; central Belgium is gently rolling farmland; and the southeast rises into the forested plateau of the Ardennes, which continues into Luxembourg and Germany. The Scheldt and the Meuse drain the country northward, and a dense canal network still moves freight between the ports and the interior.
History of Belgium
The medieval County of Flanders and the Duchy of Brabant grew rich on cloth and trade, and Bruges, Ghent and later Antwerp were among the wealthiest cities in Europe. The territory passed through Burgundian, Spanish, Austrian, French and Dutch rule before a revolution in Brussels in 1830 established an independent kingdom whose neutrality the great powers guaranteed.
Leopold II held the Congo Free State from 1885 as a personal possession, and the forced labour regime he ran there killed people on a scale historians still debate but count in the millions; the Belgian state took it over in 1908. German invasion in 1914 breached the guaranteed neutrality and brought the trench war to Flanders, and occupation followed again in 1940. Post-war reconciliation put Belgium among the six founders of the European project.
Language of Belgium
Dutch is the language of Flanders and of roughly 60 percent of Belgians, French of Wallonia and about 40 percent, and German of a small community of around 77,000 people near the eastern border. The linguistic frontier was fixed by law in 1962 and has barely moved since, and language determines which authorities, schools and media apply in a given municipality.
The Dutch of Flanders and the French of Wallonia each have their own vocabulary and accent, and Belgians use septante and nonante for seventy and ninety where French speakers in France use compound forms. Brussels lies inside Flanders geographically but is officially bilingual and predominantly French-speaking, which keeps its status at the center of every constitutional negotiation.
Culture of Belgium
The Flemish Primitives, Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, then Bruegel and Rubens, gave the region a place at the center of European painting, and the twentieth century added the surrealism of René Magritte and Paul Delvaux. Art Nouveau architecture by Victor Horta in Brussels is listed by UNESCO.
Comics are treated as a serious art: Hergé’s Tintin, Peyo’s Smurfs and Morris’s Lucky Luke all came from Belgium, and murals across Brussels mark the tradition. Belgian beer culture, with its Trappist abbey breweries and spontaneously fermented lambics from the Senne valley, is itself on the UNESCO intangible heritage list, and carnival at Binche has been separately recognized.
Economy of Belgium
Belgium runs a small, extremely open economy where trade is worth more than national output. The port of Antwerp-Bruges is the second largest in Europe and the anchor of a petrochemical cluster that is among the biggest in the world, and the country’s position makes it a distribution hub for the whole northwest of the continent.
Antwerp handles a large share of the world’s rough diamond trade, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology are strong around Leuven and Ghent, and Brussels supports a substantial services economy built around the European institutions, lobbying and international law. Output per person is high, but public debt is heavy and the productivity gap between Flanders and Wallonia, whose coal and steel industries closed decades ago, is a long-running political issue.
Politics of Belgium
Belgium is a federal constitutional monarchy that has devolved power through six state reforms since 1970. Alongside the federal government there are regional governments for Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels and community governments for the Flemish, French and German-speaking communities, an architecture designed to let each language group run its own education and culture.
Parties split along linguistic lines in the 1960s and 1970s, so no national party contests both halves of the country, and coalition formation is correspondingly slow: after the 2010 election the country went 541 days without a full federal government, a world record. Voting is compulsory, and the monarch retains a real convening role during those negotiations.
Nature & Wildlife of Belgium
The High Fens, a raised peat bog plateau in the east shared with Germany, is the largest nature reserve in Belgium and holds the country’s highest ground along with black grouse, wild boar and a landscape that stays wet and cold year round. The Ardennes forests support red deer, wild boar and returning wildcats, with occasional wolves crossing from Germany.
Beavers, extinct in Belgium by the nineteenth century, were reintroduced in the 1990s and have spread widely through the Meuse basin. The Zwin reserve on the Dutch border protects the silted remains of the inlet that once carried ships to Bruges and is an important stop for migrating waders, and the remaining coastal dunes are managed as the last near-natural stretch of shoreline.
Food & Cuisine of Belgium
Fries are Belgian rather than French in origin, fried twice for a crisp shell and soft interior, sold from standalone frituren and eaten with mayonnaise or one of a long list of sauces. Moules-frites, mussels steamed with white wine or celery and served with a bucket for the shells, is the closest thing to a national dish.
Carbonade flamande braises beef in dark beer with mustard and bread, waterzooi from Ghent is a creamy chicken or fish stew, and speculoos, waffles from Brussels and Liège, and pralines invented by Neuhaus in 1912 cover the sweet side. Belgian brewing spans Trappist ales brewed at abbeys, sour lambic and gueuze, and the wheat beers revived from near extinction at Hoegaarden.
Landmarks of Belgium
The Grand-Place in Brussels, ringed by the Gothic town hall and the gilded baroque guildhalls rebuilt after a French bombardment in 1695, is a World Heritage Site and the center of the city, carpeted with flowers every second August. The Atomium, a 102-meter model of an iron crystal built for the 1958 world fair, is the modern counterpart.
Bruges preserves an almost complete medieval town within its canals, and Ghent’s St Bavo’s Cathedral holds the van Eyck brothers’ Ghent Altarpiece, the most stolen artwork in history. The belfries of Flanders and Wallonia are listed collectively by UNESCO, and the battlefields around Ypres and Waterloo mark the two wars that made and unmade European orders.
People & Society of Belgium
Belgium has around 11.8 million residents in a small area, making it one of the most densely populated countries in Europe. Roughly six in ten live in Flanders, and Brussels, with about 1.2 million, is by far the most internationally mixed part of the country, where a majority of residents have foreign roots.
Because education, broadcasting and most cultural institutions are organized by language community, Flemish and Walloon Belgians read different newspapers, watch different television and increasingly learn each other’s language less well than English. Immigration, historically from Italy, Morocco and Turkey through post-war labour recruitment and more recently from across the European Union, has made the cities markedly diverse.
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