August 30, 2024
In Bruges (a photo gallery)
I’msure it will surprise no one to hear that we arrive in Bruges in a state of innocence and ignorance. We’ve heard that the city is famously beautiful and thus likely to be crawling with tourists, but beyond that our exposure is limited to scenes from the dark comedy/crime caper In Bruges that we saw when it came out fifteen years ago - a delightful film if you like this sort of thing, starring Colin Ferrell, Brendan Gleeson as hapless hitmen and Ralph Fiennes as their evil overlord. I’ve forgotten anything about it though, but rereading the plot summary brings it all back and makes me wish to see it again.
We’re even so ignorant about the city that I have to look up its spelling and see that there are three to choose from: the French one (Bruges), the Dutch (Brugge), and the German (Brügge).
We’re so ignorant that when we arrive in the city and sit down to lunch we can’t figure out what the language is when we pull up Google Translate to decipher it for us. Neither Belgian and Flemish appear on the language list for some reason, but we eventually figure out that it’s in Dutch, the same language we’ve been staring at for the past four days. Dutch because Bruges is in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking half of the country rather than the French one, Walloon.
So if we’re in the Dutch-speaking half, why haven’t we gone with their name for the place and called it Brugge? No answer for that, but we’re not going back and updating the previous posts now.
It doesn’t take long at all to confirm our two preconceptions. It really is a beautiful place, and it’s full of tourists. It’s not terribly full of them though to the point that you can’t escape them or see beyond them to the city itself - but it’s big and busy enough that I found it better to take it in small doses, wandering around for about two hours getting lost the evening we arrived, and seeing it by bike the next morning on my way out to the polders.
And it’s a gross overstatement to say that after two nights here we’ve seen or done Bruges. We’ve only cracked the cover on a place where virtually every one of its inner city streets has interest, a place compelling enough that it’s cited twice on the UNESCO World Heritage list - once for the entirety of the historical center, and once for having one of the remarkable belfries of Belgium and France.
Maybe our most immediate reaction though is to its many canals. It reminds us of Venice, and it’s no surprise when I later learn that one of its monikers is Venice of the North.
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Bruges is more than just a pretty place though. It has a deep and typically tormented history, with its prehistoric origins as a coastal settlement dating back to the Bronze and Iron Ages and yielding over time to invasion by the Romans and then the Vikings before becoming established as the capital of Flanders and a major trading center, a member of the Hanseatic League. Its heyday ended in around 1500 when the waterway connecting it to the sea silted up, but revival began in the 19th century when it became one of the first tourist destinations in Europe. Today it claims or endures around eight million tourists per year.
So how much needs to be seen and how much needs to be shown here of a place where so much information is readily available already? Not much - just enough to remind ourselves, and maybe enough to encourage you to come and see for yourself.
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