Brussels: area by area: The Lower Town

The Lower and Upper Towns are divided by a long boulevard, given a string of grand names along its various sections.

The Grand’ Place, a wide-open cobbled medieval square of elegant guildhouses, is one of Brussels’ few knock-me-down attractions. In summer, there is a daily flower market on the square, often with concerts and a son et lumière display in the evenings.
The Town Hall is the Lower Town’s landmark building; its spire will be your point of reference as you weave through the Lower Town streets, especially St-Géry and Ste-Catherine, across boulevard Anspach from the Bourse. The daily business of Brussels takes place here, in the many local bars and cafés whose character and quality are the stuff of legend.
St-Géry thrives on the trendy bars surrounding an old covered market on place St-Géry.
The cafés, restaurants and nightspots take on a life of their own in the summer months, when the buzz is thickly atmospheric and nothing seems able to keep the locals at home. Ste-Catherine, the town’s harbour area before the river was land-filled in the 1870s, is lined with seafood restaurants, and their waiters serve up dishes of lobster, mussels and oysters, tripping across the road to serve on the canopied terraces.
Take a walk along rue des Chartreux and you’ll find some highly individual shops, tea-rooms and the Greenwich bar where Magritte played chess and tried to hawk his quirky paintings.
Immediately north of the Grand’ Place, the Ilot Sacré is an evocative medieval tangle of narrow streets filled with tourist restaurants. South, amid the dusty old shops in rue de l’Etuve, sprinkles the little statue of the urinating urchin – Mannekin-Pis – the symbol of Brussels.
Further south in the earthy Marolles quarter, rue Haute has barely changed since the 16th-century Flemish artist Bruegel observed it from his window at No.132.
This is Brussels at its most authentic – the daily flea market at place du Jeu de Balle is the area’s hub.
Across the Marolles, and the rest of the Lower Town, are murals of cartoon characters, Belgium’s comic-strip heroes writ large.
Get a map from the tourist office beneath the town hall and take a walk around the 20 murals, beginning at the Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée, the popular and inventive Comic Strip Museum, full of Tintin iconography.
The souvenir shop is a treasure trove of goodies.
The building is set in a beautiful old department store designed by Victor Horta, the father of art nouveau, whose genius spawned three decades of ornate architecture still visible around town. As Gaudí shaped Barcelona, Horta and his architectural acolytes shaped the face of Brussels.