The best things to do in Ghent are the Van Eyck altarpiece in St Bavo’s Cathedral, the Gravensteen, the Belfry and the medieval quays at Graslei and Korenlei, all within a ten minute walk of one another. Give the city two days, arrive by train rather than by car, and book the cathedral’s timed slot before you travel.
Ghent got rich on cloth, and by the fourteenth century it was one of the largest and wealthiest cities in northern Europe, rich enough to argue with its own counts and lose. That history is still the shape of the place: a castle built to overawe the citizens, a belfry built to store the charters that protected them, and a cathedral holding the single most valuable painting in Belgium. What Ghent is not is a museum piece. Fifty thousand students keep the bars honest, seventy hectares of the centre are closed to cars, and the ten entries below run roughly in the order the geography suggests, from the cathedral square out to the water and the university tower.
See the Van Eyck altarpiece in St Bavo’s Cathedral
Cathedral· Sint-Baafsplein, Ghent
The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb was finished in 1432 by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, and it is the reason most first-time visitors come to Ghent at all. Restorers have worked through it panel by panel since 2012, lifting later overpaint and returning the colour the brothers actually laid down. The visitors’ centre in the crypt hands you an augmented-reality headset and walks you through the theft, the wartime hiding places and the iconography before you climb up to the polyptych itself, now shown in a climate-controlled case. The AR tour alone runs about an hour, so do not treat this as a twenty-minute stop.
Philip of Alsace, count of Flanders, raised the stone castle in 1180 on the site of an older motte-and-bailey that had burned a few years earlier. He had seen crusader fortresses in the Holy Land, and the moat, curtain wall and central keep were aimed less at foreign armies than at the citizens of Ghent below them. Inside there is an armoury, a room of judicial instruments the city used on its own people, and a walkway around the top with the closest view of the rooftops you will get. The audio guide is played for laughs, which sounds like a gimmick and mostly is not.
Time1 hr
CostTicketed
Best atLate afternoon
TipThe rampart walk is the point, so leave time for the top rather than the armoury
Ghent began its belfry in 1313, at the height of the cloth boom, and the tower reaches 91 metres. It was a strongbox as much as a symbol: the city’s charters and privileges were locked in the fortified chamber known as the Secreet, proof in stone that Ghent answered to itself rather than to its count. UNESCO lists it among the belfries of Belgium and France. From the gallery the other two of the city’s three towers, St Nicholas’ Church and St Bavo’s Cathedral, line up along the same medieval spine.
Time45 min
CostTicketed
Best atClear afternoons
TipGo up before the light drops; the gallery view is what you paid for
The Graslei and the Korenlei face each other across the old inner harbour, and the gabled fronts on both banks were the guild houses and warehouses of a port built on the grain trade. The stone building on the Graslei is the Romanesque staple house, put up around 1200 to hold the city’s grain. In the evening the quay steps fill with students drinking supermarket beer, which is the most accurate picture of contemporary Ghent available anywhere in the city. Boats leave from jetties on both sides.
Time30 min
CostFree
Best atThe hour before sunset
TipThe photograph is taken from the Korenlei side, looking across at the Graslei
The 40-minute guided trip is the quickest way to understand the shape of the centre: the Leie and the Lieve did work the streets could not, and half the buildings turn their best face to the water. Boats leave from jetties on the Graslei and the Korenlei, every fifteen to twenty minutes in high season and less often out of it, with commentary in Dutch, English and French. Covered boats run when the weather turns, which in Flanders it does.
Time40 min
CostTicketed
Best atMid-morning
TipCheck which quay your operator leaves from; the Graslei and Korenlei jetties are different companies
The city museum occupies the Bijloke, a fourteenth-century abbey and a seventeenth-century convent joined to a twenty-first-century building, which is itself an argument about how Ghent grew. The centrepiece is a walk-on aerial photograph of the city; the collection runs to more than 300 objects, with scale models and film doing the rest. Go early in a trip rather than late. The centre makes far more sense once you have seen how the rivers were moved and the port shifted north.
Time1.5 hr
CostTicketed
Best atDay one
TipWalk out along the Coupure canal rather than taking the tram
The MSK sits in the Citadelpark and runs from the Flemish Primitives to the twentieth century, with Bosch, Rubens and a deep holding of Ensor. Its conservation studio is where the Ghent Altarpiece has been restored behind glass and in public view since 2012, work due to finish at the end of 2026. S.M.A.K., the contemporary museum, stands across the park, so the two make one afternoon rather than two.
Time2 hr
CostTicketed
Best atRainy days
TipPair it with S.M.A.K. across the park and do both on one walk
The museum occupies the old Alijn children’s hospital, a courtyard of low whitewashed houses off the Kraanlei. The collection is family photographs, home movies, funeral cards, wedding suits and toys, arranged by ritual rather than by date, and it treats the twentieth century as something worth keeping. It is the least imposing museum in Ghent and the one visitors talk about afterwards. There is a café in the courtyard.
Time1.5 hr
CostTicketed
Best atAny weather
TipThe home-movie rooms are the reason to come, so leave time for them
The city opened this 120-metre alley to painters during the Over the Edges festival in 1995, partly to make something of a dead lane and partly to keep spray paint off the listed buildings around it. Anyone may paint here and everyone does, so walls, doors and window frames change from week to week and nothing you photograph will survive the season. It runs a minute from the Belfry and it costs nothing.
Time15 min
CostFree
Best atDaylight
TipPhotograph what you like when you see it; it will be painted over
Henry van de Velde, one of the founders of Belgian Art Nouveau, was commissioned in 1933 to design a library tower for Ghent University and finished it in 1942, by which time he had left ornament behind entirely. The Book Tower is 64 metres of concrete laid out as a Greek cross, and it holds around three million books, manuscripts, maps and posters. It stands south of the centre among the university buildings: a modernist fourth tower answering three medieval ones.
Time45 min
CostTicketed
Best atWeekday afternoons
TipCheck the opening arrangements before you walk out; access to the upper floors is limited
Two. The first covers the cathedral, the Belfry, the Gravensteen and the quays, all within ten minutes of each other on foot; the second covers the museums in the Citadelpark and the Bijloke, the Patershol and a boat trip. One day works if you accept seeing the altarpiece and skipping the museums.
Is Ghent better than Bruges?+
They answer different questions. Bruges has the more complete medieval centre and far more visitors; Ghent has the greater single artwork, fifty thousand students and a city that is lived in rather than looked at. They are twenty-five minutes apart by train, so the honest answer is to see both and sleep in Ghent.
Do you need to book the Ghent Altarpiece in advance?+
Book the timed entry online rather than queueing on the Sint-Baafsplein. The visit starts with an augmented-reality tour in the crypt that runs about an hour before you reach the polyptych itself, so allow more time than a painting normally needs.
How do you get from Brussels Airport to Ghent?+
By train from the station under the terminal. A direct service to Gent-Sint-Pieters runs roughly ten times a day and takes about an hour; otherwise change at Brussels, which costs about ten minutes. From Gent-Sint-Pieters, tram 1 runs into the centre.
Is Ghent walkable?+
Yes. The car-free core covers about 70 hectares and everything in this guide except the Citadelpark museums is within a walk of the Korenmarkt. The streets are flat and cobbled, so bring shoes rather than a car, and use tram 1 for the run to and from the station.
Where to eat
Best restaurants in Ghent
Five kitchens, from two Michelin stars to a brasserie under a glass roof.
Michaël Vrijmoed holds two Michelin stars for cooking that puts vegetables at the centre of the plate and treats fish and meat as seasoning. It is the most ambitious table in the city and the hardest to book, so start there rather than finish there.
Olly Ceulenaere cooks a short set menu built on Flemish produce, including the vegetables and grains most kitchens ignore, in a loft-like room on the Ham. One Michelin star, and the least formal room in Ghent that holds one.
Marcelo Ballardin cooks one tasting menu of sharp, unexpected combinations in a small room on the Hoogstraat, west of the tourist centre. One Michelin star, and a shorter walk from the Gravensteen than the address suggests.
A small kitchen in the Patershol working from whatever the season delivers, listed in the Michelin guide without a star and priced accordingly. Book it, because the room does not hold many.
A nineteenth-century warehouse turned brasserie, iron columns and a glass roof, serving oysters, steak and Flemish standards from lunch until late. It is the reliable answer when a table for six is needed at short notice.
A dark tavern on the Vrijdagmarkt with a beer list in the hundreds. Order the house Max and you surrender a shoe, which rides up to the ceiling in a basket until you hand back the 1.2-litre glass. The trick is old; the list is serious.
On the water at the Groentenmarkt, with a long draught list and terrace tables facing the Gravensteen. It is the one bar in this band where the view competes with the glass.
A cellar bar beside the church of St James, heavy on Trappist and abbey beers, with trolls on the shelves and a quieter room upstairs. The flea market sets up on the doorstep three mornings a week.
Thirty taps in Hal 16, an old industrial hall in the Dok Noord docklands north of the centre, brewing on site and pouring Belgian and international styles beside a barbecue kitchen. It is where Ghent drinks when it is bored of abbey beer.
Gruut brews with a mix of herbs instead of hops, the way Flanders brewed before hops arrived, and the results taste properly unfamiliar. The city brewery and its tap sit east of the centre on the Rembert Dodoensdreef.
The municipal contemporary art museum, in a former casino building across the Citadelpark from the MSK, built on the collection Jan Hoet assembled from the 1970s onward. The temporary shows are the reason to check what is on before you go.
Bosch, Rubens, the Flemish Primitives and a deep run of Ensor, plus the glass-walled studio where the Ghent Altarpiece has been restored in public since 2012. Two hours minimum, more if the studio is working.
A cotton mill near the Vrijdagmarkt, kept as a museum of the industry that made and then unmade working Ghent, across three permanent exhibitions and several floors of machines. It is the least visited of the big museums and the most specific to this city.
Housed in the Hospice Guislain of 1857, the first building in Belgium put up specifically to treat mental illness, and now a museum of the history of psychiatry and of what has counted as madness. It is a serious hour and not a light one.
A Benedictine foundation whose roots run back to the seventh century, now an exhibition centre on the Sint-Pietersplein. The church and the gardens are free, and the fruit garden behind them still grows vines on the slope down towards the Scheldt.
The design collection, from 1860 to now, in the eighteenth-century Hotel de Coninck on the Jan Breydelstraat. It closed in March 2022 for a four-year rebuild and reopens on 3 October 2026 with a new wing, so check the date against your trip.
An all-vegan buffet on the Reep, where the Leie and the Scheldt were reconnected, with a big room and a small terrace. It is the easiest place in the city to eat well without deciding anything.
A long-running vegetarian kitchen off the Zandberg that has since added fish and meat, which annoyed some regulars and widened the table for everyone else. Lunch is the main event.
Across the square from Gent-Sint-Pieters station, cooking vegan and organic from local suppliers and whatever the season is doing. It makes the right first or last meal of a trip.
Soups, burgers, salads, pasta and curries on the Nederkouter, served fast and priced for students. The everyday answer to Veggie Thursday rather than the special-occasion one.
An organic vegetarian kitchen in a warren of small rooms in the shadow of the Gravensteen, cooking mostly from local produce. The quietest of the five, and the one with a garden.
Ten streets of narrow brick houses behind the castle, settled by leather workers in the tenth century, a slum by the twentieth, and rebuilt from the 1980s into the city’s restaurant quarter. The street plan has no logic, which is most of the appeal.
Charles V was born here in 1500, in a walled court with hundreds of chambers and its own zoo, and almost none of it survives. What is left is empty cobbled lanes, seventeenth-century brick and stretches of the river Lieve, five minutes from the crowds and largely unvisited.
The old meeting of the Leie and the Scheldt, reopened as a marina, with an outdoor pool and quays that fill on a warm evening. It is where the city goes when the centre is full.
A working dock turned into halls of breweries, food and studios, ten minutes north of the Vrijdagmarkt on foot. Ghent’s newest quarter, and the one that looks least like a postcard.
The medieval centre UNESCO listed in 2000, twenty-five minutes away by train and busier than Ghent by some margin. Go on the early train, and come back on a late one rather than the first.
Rubens, the diamond quarter, the Plantin-Moretus printing house and the best fashion shopping in Belgium, about fifty minutes up the line. The railway station alone repays the fare.
The Grand Place, the Magritte museum and the European quarter, half an hour away on trains that run several times an hour. It is the day trip to take on a whim rather than a plan.
A tapestry town on the Scheldt, under forty minutes south, with a late-Gothic town hall and the Tour of Flanders centre at the foot of the climbs. Cycling country starts here.
The North Sea, a working fishing port, Ensor’s home town and a long beach at the end of the same line that runs through Bruges. Worth the trip on a clear day and not otherwise.
Mustard ground on the premises since 1790 and ladled out of a wooden barrel into a stoneware pot. Sharp enough to be a souvenir with a use, and the shop on the Groentenmarkt has barely changed.
Belgium’s longest-running flea market, on the square in front of the church of St James on Friday, Saturday and Sunday mornings, with vintage and antique shops filling the streets around it the rest of the week.
The main shopping street, chains and department stores, running from the Korenmarkt towards the Kouter. The boutiques worth a detour are on the side streets, Voldersstraat and Brabantdam among them.
The Friday morning market has been held on this square for centuries, selling food and household goods under the statue of Jacob van Artevelde. The square doubles as the city’s political stage, which it has been for seven hundred years.
Eight dates that fill the squares, from the March marathon to the winter market.
Feb
Ghent Light Festival
A trail of light installations and projections through the historic centre, staged every three years. There is no 2026 edition; the next is due in 2027.
Mar
Ghent Marathon
The city marathon, half marathon and shorter distances, run through the centre and out along the water. The 2026 edition was held on 29 March.
Jul
Gent Jazz Festival
Two weeks of jazz and adjacent music on the Bijloke site, the same abbey grounds that hold the city museum. Mid-July, largely ticketed.
Jul
Gentse Feesten
Ten days that take over the whole centre with music, street theatre and stalls, running 17 to 26 July in 2026. It has been free since 1843 and is one of the largest public festivals in Europe.
Sep
OdeGand
One night of classical concerts staged in venues along the canals, with boats moving the audience between them. It is part of the Festival van Vlaanderen in Ghent.
Oct
Film Fest Gent
Belgium’s largest film festival, built around film music, with more than a hundred features and shorts. The 53rd edition runs 7 to 18 October 2026.
Nov
Zesdaagse Vlaanderen-Gent
Six days of track racing at ’t Kuipke, the wooden velodrome in the Citadelpark, in front of a crowd that treats it as a night out as much as a race.
Dec
Ghent Christmas market
More than 150 wooden huts spreading from Sint-Baafsplein along the Botermarkt and Klein Turkije to the Korenmarkt, and the surrounding streets decorated to match.
Getting around
Ghent transport & airports
How to arrive from Brussels Airport, and why nobody drives into the centre.
BRU
Brussels Airport
The country’s main airport, with its station directly under the terminal and a direct train to Gent-Sint-Pieters roughly ten times a day, taking about an hour. Otherwise change at Brussels and lose ten minutes.
Gent-Sint-Pieters sits about two kilometres south of the centre, with Bruges 25 minutes away, Brussels about 30 and Antwerp about 50, several times an hour on each route. It is the reason a car is not worth hiring.
Tram 1 runs from the station through the centre every few minutes and is the ride most visitors need. De Lijn also covers the docklands and the outer districts by bus.
The car-free core covers about 70 hectares, the largest in Belgium, and a low emission zone surrounds it. Everything in this guide except the Citadelpark museums is a walk; the flat streets and the towpaths make a rented bike better still.
The stews, the sweets and the mustard to order before you leave.
Gentse waterzooi
A creamy stew thickened with egg yolk and cream, made with chicken today and with river fish before that, alongside leek, carrot, celery and potato. It is the city’s own dish and it travels badly.
Gentse stoverij
Beef stewed slowly in dark Belgian beer with mustard and bread, served with fries. The Flemish answer to boeuf bourguignon, and the default order in any brown café.
Paling in ’t groen
Eel in a green sauce of sorrel, chervil, parsley and whatever else the kitchen picks, a dish of the Leie and the Scheldt. Order it in spring, when the herbs make sense.
Cuberdons
Cone-shaped raspberry sweets, called neuzekes (little noses) here, made in Ghent since 1873. The shell is firm and the centre is nearly liquid, which is the point and the mess.
Mastellen
Ring-shaped rolls flavoured with cinnamon, eaten at breakfast and around religious feasts. Plain, cheap and better warm than the description suggests.
Ganda ham
Dry-cured ham named for Ganda, the old name of the city: pork leg rubbed with salt and left in the air for months, with no smoke and no spice. Buy it sliced from a delicatessen.
Tierenteyn mustard
Ground on the Groentenmarkt since 1790 from mustard seed, vinegar and salt, and sharp enough to clear a head. It is the condiment to the stoverij and the souvenir to take home.
Gruut beer
Beer brewed with a herb mixture rather than hops, the way Flanders brewed before hops took over, made in the city at the Gruut brewery. Order it once to taste the difference and again if you like it.
Ghent fact sheet
Ghent at a glance
The essentials worth knowing before you go.
Country
Belgium
Region
East Flanders, Flanders
Population
About 270,000 (municipality, end of 2024)
Founded
Abbeys on the Scheldt, seventh century
Nickname
Arteveldestad, after Jacob van Artevelde
Language
Dutch
Currency
Euro (€)
Time zone
CET (UTC+1)
Calling code
+32 9
Airports
Brussels (BRU), Ostend-Bruges (OST)
Power
230V, type E
Emergency
112
Interesting facts
One panel of the Ghent Altarpiece, the Just Judges, was stolen from the cathedral in 1934 and has never been recovered. A copy painted in the 1940s stands in its place, and the case is still open.
Charles V was born at the Prinsenhof in 1500. In 1540 he put down a tax revolt in his own birthplace by making the city’s notables walk barefoot with nooses round their necks, which is why people from Ghent are still called stroppendragers, noose bearers.
The car-free heart of Ghent covers about 70 hectares, the largest such zone in Belgium, and a low emission zone surrounds it. Driving through the centre is deliberately slow, and the city considers that a feature.
Ghent declared Thursday a vegetarian day in May 2009, working with the Flemish organisation EVA, and put it into municipal schools and nurseries. Around fifteen restaurants in the city are now entirely vegetarian.
Ghent University, founded in 1817, had 50,936 students in 2025/26, about one for every five residents. That ratio is why the bars are cheap and the terraces are full on a Tuesday.
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