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| Canal at sunset in Bruges |
A shifting coastline and the economic depression it wrought may seem unlikely preconditions for a tourist industry. But had the channel that connected Bruges to the coast not silted up in the 16th century, so compromising the burgeoning city’s status as a port, it might never have been lost in the time warp that has reserved its extraordinary stock of gothic monuments and step-gabled canal houses.
Deprived of its principal livelihood and bypassed by the industrial revolution, Bruges fell into a sort of Sleeping Beauty repose, its fairytale loveliness untrammelled by progress. By the time the 19th-century writer Georges Rodenbach published his popular if morbid fin-de-siècle novel Bruges-la-morte (in turn the inspiration for Erich Korngold’s no less mad-with-misery Die tote Stadt), the fortunes of this celebratedly “dead” city had begun to revive thanks to its reinvention as a kind of early northern Renaissance theme park drawing visitors from across Europe, the British in particular.
Not that Rodenbach’s overwrought descriptions of Bruges’s “mute atmosphere of water and deserted streets” were much of an advertisement. Today, however, those exquisite cobbled streets hum with visitors. And its improbably pretty canals – “cold arteries”, according to Rodenbach, that had “long-since ceased to beat with the great pulse of the sea” – teem with swans and tourist boats, at least during the day. By night, when the trippers have gone back to their cruise ships at Zeebrugge (10km north) or their billets in Brussels (50 minutes away by train), it takes on a captivating stillness, its spiky floodlit architecture reflected in the glassy sheets of water that encircle and cross-hatch the centre.
People complain about the tour parties in Bruges but they are easily avoided. On a sunny Saturday in September, I had the Arentshuis museum to myself. Devoted to the underrated Bruges-born British painter and printmaker Frank Brangwyn, whose best-known works are probably the murals now undergoing restoration at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York (where he also designed for Louis Comfort Tiffany), the collection focuses on brooding cityscapes, heroic depictions of working men and wintry woodcuts of trees. Not what I’d expected in medieval Bruges but a revelation all the same.
I’d come to see the northern Renaissance masterpieces it is famous for: the sublime Memling altarpieces in the chapel of the medieval Sint-Jan Hospitaal, not to mention the transfixing 1480 portrait of the serene Sybilla Sambetha, her bejewelled, finely manicured fingers peeping out over the edge of the painted frame. For the moment, Hieronymous Bosch’s two best-known triptychs, “The Torments of Job” and his yet more terrifying, more surreal “Last Judgment”, can be found here too. They belong to Bruges’s most important gallery, the Groeninge, closed for a rehang when I was there but now reopened, so I missed its remarkable collection of works by Flemish masters from Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden to Delvaux and Magritte.
Almost to underline my disappointment, a reproduction of the Groeninge’s majestic portrait of Philip the Good of Burgundy, by van der Weyden, hung in my room at the Dukes’ Palace, the latest hotel to open in Bruges and, remarkably, for a city so dependent on tourism, its first and only five-star. With its quiet location just off the main shopping street, Noordzandstraat, and within walking distance of every sight, as well as the station, the hotel makes an excellent base; its substantial garden, its young, obliging, mostly local staff, and its history, for it has been partly converted from a 15th-century Burgundian ducal palace, are also worthy of note.
While much is also faux-Renaissance and newly built – a witch’s-hat tower, for instance, is actually the casing for an ornate 19th-century Otis lift – there are historic elements in some of the suites. But, if the 15th-century frescoes, fireplaces and moulded plaster ceilings sit well within a decorative scheme that juxtaposes contemporary with classic furniture and favours warm taupes, reds and occasional bolts of brocade, there is also something just a little odd and not thought-through about it.
My hosts knew I was a journalist and had given me a suite, a lofty attic of 80 sq m with an elaborate tracery of ancient beams. Obviously, there was a bed, a desk, a built-in wardrobe and a low cupboard with the mini-bar inside and a coffee-maker on top but they’d filled the cavernous space beyond that with chairs: eight of them, not that you could see the television from any of them, for that was visible only from the bed. This passion for multiples extended to the art: my room also contained not one but two reproduction Philip the Goods (the duke, after whom the hotel is named, died here in 1467), one in the vestibule by the door and one by the bed, though I suspect this was an oversight rather than a statement.
The restaurant at the Dukes’ Palace is popular, if over-lit, and serves hearty portions of international and traditional Belgian dishes: salads of little grey North Sea shrimps, steak tartare, the beer-and-beef stew known as stovery. But, in a long weekend of self-indulgence (hot waffles with melted white chocolate; nowhere in Europe does street food better than Belgium), the best meal I ate was at Den Dijver, a homely yet buzzy family-run restaurant that matches beers, or wines if you prefer, with a brief modern European menu, providing an education in what defines a lambic (naturally fermented with no added yeast), red or wheat beer. And indeed how hop-flavoured brews differ from those made with gruut, a mix of herbs and spices used, for example, in the dark delicious Dubbel Bruin, which the Steenbrugge brewery has been making here since 1084 and which is served in stemmed glasses in the elegant bar at the Dukes’ Palace.
Gruut also gives its name to yet another museum – the Gruuthuse – an ornate 15th-century mansion named after a family who made their fortune making and selling it. The museum is worth a look inside not least for the glimpse it gives into how these mansions were planned internally, here’s there’s a little upstairs oratory that enabled the family to observe mass in the magnificent next-door church, Onze Lieve Vrouwkerk, without having to mix with the congregation. Avoiding the church, though, would mean missing its Michelangelo “Madonna and Child” – intended for Siena cathedral and thought to be the only one of Michelangelo’s works to have left Italy during the artist’s lifetime – that stands in a chapel to the right of the altar, eclipsing the other art in the church. Not that the recently excavated tombs with their colourful painted interiors of angels swinging censers aren’t intriguing too.
Transfixingly beautiful, Bruges is full of such surprises: small delights you just happen upon like the relief of a pelican with seven young pecking at her breast I noticed on the wall of an almshouse on the Groenerei canal, then came across again amid the overwrought decoration of the Basilica of the Holy Blood – Christ’s, so it is claimed (the little phial containing it is venerated on Friday afternoons).
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| Group tours are banned from the Begijnhof or Beguinage |
Despite its many visitors, Bruges doesn’t feel overwhelmed or exploited. There may be legion shops selling lace and chocolates but there’s no litter, no Starbucks, indeed few global brands (the one McDonald’s is well away from the centre). Rather, it’s a place of modest family businesses determined to keep alive 1,000 years of history. Which, combined with the fact that most of the 3m who visit annually come by rail or road, suggests this may be tourism at its most sustaining and sustainable.
Claire Wrathall was a guest of the Kempinski Dukes’ Palace (www.kempinski-bruges.com; superior doubles from €229 including breakfast), and Eurostar (www.eurostar.com; London to Bruges via Brussels from £59)
