Chocolate-box city Print E-mail
Written by Penny Kitchen, 2008   
Bruges is pretty and compact, with oodles of good eateries - oh yes, and chocolate. And beer. Penny Kitchen recommends it for an out-of-season break Bruges should be on chocolate boxes, it's so pretty. Well, actually it is - on plenty of them! Belgium and chocolate go together, like Belgium and beer and Belgium and lace, and the place to find all three in picturesque quaint surroundings is Bruges.

In fact, Bruges is a good deal older than modern Belgium itself, which was, after all, only formed as a federal state in 1830, having first been part of a Dutch 'buffer zone' following the Napoleonic wars.

Today there is an uneasy segregation between French-speaking Belgians in the south (and in Brussels) and Dutch-speaking in the north who make up 60 per cent of the population. Bruges is in Flanders, the more prosperous Dutch-speaking part of the country.

The handsome gothic buildings date back to a time when Bruges was a wealthy port, attracting merchants from Britain and elsewhere to trade in diamonds, wool and lace. However when the Zwin estuary silted up, blocking the town's access to the sea and leaving Bruges and its network of canals stranded, the commerce moved to Antwerp.

Thereafter industrialisation passed Bruges by, so it remained 'preserved in aspic' for us to enjoy pretty much unspoiled hundreds of years later. Today some three million visitors pour into Bruges annually, so if you want to avoid the crowds, do go outside of the high season.

Apart from the Flemish gothic architecture, the most instantly noticeable feature of Bruges is its canals. During the day the buildings are reflected in the murky water and tour boats chug under the bridges. By night they provide a romantic backdrop, sparkling with light reflected from the windows and street lamps.

The city is compact and a pleasure to explore on foot, although if you want you can get your bearings first on a horse-drawn carriage ride that starts in the Markt Square. If museums, galleries and churches are your thing, then Bruges has them in abundance, the latter richly decorated from its period of trading wealth.

Jan Van Eyck, one of the foremost painters of the 14th century, worked and died in Bruges. An impressive collection of his paintings can be seen in the Groeninge Museum, along with those of other Flemish artists.

It pays to get away from the main square in Bruges to find lots of excellent restaurants - near the fish, market half a dozen fish restaurants do a roaring trade.

Drink a beer at a café overlooking a canal or head down the back streets to the very old 'brown' pubs with yellowed walls and great atmosphere frequented by the locals. Brugs Beertje and Craenenburg (open from 7am to midnight daily!) are two.

The Halve Maan brewery is one of the few left in Bruges itself but it's a tourist scrum and you need to be fit for the stairs if you join one of the hourly tours.

If you've gone overboard on chocolate and beer to take home, consider buying some of the attractive beer glasses, in dozens of different shapes each with its own beer label on the side - useful and less fattening souvenirs! (Speaking of souvenirs, the famed lace if genuine is unbelievably expensive; the rest is made in China.)

An advantage of having your car in Bruges is that you can easily see sights beyond the city. One I would certainly recommend is the little town of Damme, only a matter of minutes away, towards Zeebrugge. When the port of Bruges silted up, this once walled town with its historic windmill became a harbour for its marooned neighbour.

You might be lucky, as we were, and find a market selling cheese and honey in the town hall square, an oompah band and procession of town worthies that could have come straight out of the medieval past. There are some good restaurants here, too, well worth stopping for.

Getting there

P&O Ferries offers a choice of 25 return crossings every day on its 90-minute Dover - Calais service. Bruges is an easy one hour and 15 minute drive from Calais.

Fares for a car and passengers are from just £15 each way for day trips, and from £30 each way for longer stays. Lunch can be taken on board at Langan's Brasserie. See www.POferries.com for details and bookings or call 08705 20 20 20.

For information on Flanders and accommodation contact Tourism Flanders-Brussels www.visitflanders.co.uk tel: 0207 307 7742 (also www.brugge.be)

Chocolate - a matter of taste

The Mayan and Aztec civilisations served a frothy, bitter fermented mixture of water, pulp of cacao fruit, maize, chilli and honey to celebrate important occasions such as births and weddings, but it would have been hard to recognise as the cocoa drink we have today.

So valuable were the cacao beans, they were even used as currency. When the Spaniards arrived in the New World in the 16th century, they introduced sugar to sweeten the chocolate.

Bruges' fascinating Chocolate Museum (naffly named Choco-Story) is located in a gorgeous medieval building called Croon House and explains the history of chocolate right back to these early civilisations.

This was fresh in my mind as I watched avant garde chocolatier Dominique Persoone extolling the virtues of some of his weirder concoctions - containing chilli pepper, olive oil, herbs and a host of other ingredients not normally found in a truffle!

There is no escaping chocolate in Bruges - it's on most restaurant menus (including a few exotic main courses) and you might even find a chocolate-based massage treatment in some spas.

A tourist initiative called The Chocolate Walk takes in half a dozen shops where you can get a discount on the chocolates and/or a demonstration of how they are made.

Time a romantic winter break for the weekend before Valentines Day when the city's 48 chocolatiers put on a tempting chocolate market.
 
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