Our Lady, the Beguinage and the Minnewater

Bonifaciusbrug

A small bridge, a palace wall, and the beer tax behind them.

The Bonifaciusbrug is one of the newest bridges in Bruges, short enough to cross without noticing. Stop halfway anyway. On one side, the choir and tower of the Church of Our Lady; on the other, the long brick frontage of the Gruuthuse palace; below you, the Dijver, the canal that carried barges into the city when Bruges was the busiest trading town in northern Europe.

The palace takes its name from a business. Gruut was the blend of herbs that brewers had to buy from the lords of Gruuthuse before hops came into use, and that monopoly helped make the family one of the richest in Flanders. In the 15th century Louis of Gruuthuse, who governed Holland and Zeeland for the Burgundian dukes, gave the house the shape you are looking at now, and had a chapel linked to the church next door by a covered gallery, so his household could follow mass without going out into the street. The motto he carved over the door says it plainly: plus est en vous, there is more in you than you think.

Gruuthusemuseum

A 15th-century palace built on beer money, now a museum.

Inside, the palace walks you through three Bruges: the Burgundian 15th century that made it rich, the quieter 17th and 18th centuries, and the 19th-century rediscovery that turned the whole city into the postcard you are standing in. The collection carries that story, from tapestries and Gothic stained glass to lace, silver cutlery and Chinese porcelain laid out on a dinner table.

The rooms are the real exhibit. The family's private chapel, built in 1472, is still in place, and on the upper floor the covered gallery that linked the palace to the church looks straight down at the Bonifaciusbrug and the back of the choir, the view the Gruuthuses had while the rest of the town was at work.

Bruges has been showing its collections in this house since 1876. In 2020 the museum won a Flemish heritage prize, and a year later it was named Europe's most welcoming museum. Entry is 15 euros, or 19 combined with the church museum next door. It closes one day a week, so check before you set out.

Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk

A 115-metre brick tower, a paid chancel, Michelangelo's Madonna.

The tower of the Church of Our Lady is 115.5 metres of brick, the second tallest brick tower in the world. Walking in is free, and worth it for the width of the nave alone. Nearly everything people come to see, though, stands behind a ticket barrier in the chancel: a white marble Madonna and Child that Michelangelo carved around 1504 for an altar in Siena cathedral. That altar was never finished. Two Bruges merchants working in Italy, the Mouscron family, bought the sculpture and had it shipped north. On 13 August 1506 the agent Giovanni Balducci wrote to Michelangelo from Rome with the instruction: send it to Flanders, namely to Bruges. It was the first of only a few works by Michelangelo to leave Italy while he was alive.

The same chancel holds the tombs of Mary of Burgundy and her father Charles the Bold, and a Passion triptych by Bernard van Orley. Ten euros for the museum section, 19 if you combine it with the Gruuthuse. On Sundays it opens at half past one.