At the beginning of the school holidays my husband and I spent a few days in Antwerp. I love Belgium and this was one city we hadn’t visited before. We’re still eating the delicious biscuits we brought back with us so I thought I would share some of our favourite sites in the city.
7 fun things to see and do in Antwerp
On our first day in Antwerp we checked into our hotel, the Hilton Antwerp Old Town hotel on Groenplaats, Antwerp’s most famous town square. After stopping for a beer in one of the many bars on the square we started exploring.
You can easily see Antwerp by foot although there’s a Metro, trams and bus network if you want to explore the edges of the city. There is also the lovely St Anna pedestrian tunnel which was built underneath the Scheldt between 1931-1933 to link the old centre with the left bank (Linkeroever). You descend 31m via wooden escalators to the 572 meter unique pedestrian passageway. Just watch out for the cyclists!
If you arrive by train you will probably arrive at the gorgeous Antwerp-Central train station. It’s well worth a visit and regarded as the finest example of railway architecture in Belgium. The original building and platforms date to 1895- 1905 but it has recently been extended to convert the station from a terminus to a through station with the addition of two underground levels.
We spent some time admiring the Cathedral of Our Lady which is Belgium’s largest Gothic Cathedral with four works by Rubens. Every day different artists were performing outside. I loved the mime artists and string quartet.
Antwerp is quite small and we frequently found ourselves walking around the Stadhuis and Guild houses, they looked beautiful lit up at night. On Sunday morning we discovered a Farmer’s market in the Grote Markt with loads of amazing stalls.
Find Philips Biscuits to buy a box of the traditional Antwerp Hands biscuits. We bought a few different types of biscuits but these are my favourite. The hand-shaped biscuits are an Antwerp speciality and refer to the legend of Antigoon, the giant who terrorised the skippers on the river Scheldt.
As we were enjoying our first ever child-free weekend I wanted to visit as many pubs as we could. My favourite was the de Groote Witte Arend parts of which dated back to the 16th century. There was a courtyard but we opted to peruse the extensive drinks menu in one of the rooms. After a couple of different Belgian beers we peeked in at the private chapel before heading back to our hotel.
You can’t have a weekend away without waffles and we discovered a lovely waffle shop called Queen of Waffles behind the Cathedral where we could watch our waffles being made. There were a couple of tables outside so we sat and watched the world go by with waffles and hot chocolates.
Hopefully we’ll be able to visit Antwerp again one day. It’s a lovely place for a weekend and we would have loved to visit the Port area but we headed to the Netherlands to visit the Miffy exhibition at the Centraal Museum Utrecht which you can read about here.
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