Belgium: A Small Country with Three Languages and Big Ideas

• Capital: Brussels [1]
• Population: about 11.7 million (2023) [2]
• Area: 30,528 square kilometers (11,787 square miles) [1]
• Official languages: Dutch, French, and German [1]
• Currency: Euro (EUR) [3]
• Home to more than 400 breweries and a beer culture recognized by UNESCO [4]

I grew up thinking Belgium was a country you passed through on the way to somewhere else. Then I spent a week there in my late twenties, missed three trains because the chocolate shops kept pulling me in, and realized I had been completely wrong. Belgium is small. You can drive across it in about three hours. But it packs in more languages, more beer styles, more medieval town squares, and more surrealist painters per square mile than almost any country I can think of. And nobody talks about this, but Belgium punches absurdly above its weight in art, food, and quiet political influence.

Belgium has three official languages, which is unusual for a country its size. Dutch is spoken in the north, in a region called Flanders. French is spoken in the south, in Wallonia. And in a small strip along the German border, about 77,000 people speak German as their first language [1]. Brussels, the capital, is officially bilingual in French and Dutch, though in practice you hear French most of the time on the street.

The language line is more than a map detail. It runs through schools, political parties, and television stations. Flanders has its own parliament. Wallonia has its own parliament. The German-speaking community has its own parliament. The federal government in Brussels coordinates between them, and the whole arrangement is held together by a constitution that has been rewritten six times since 1970 to keep everyone reasonably happy [1]. It works, mostly. It also breaks down sometimes. In 2010 and 2011 Belgium went 589 days without a federal government, the longest peacetime stretch any modern country has managed, and life carried on more or less as usual.

Brussels is the de facto capital of the European Union, and the city wears the role with a kind of low-key pride. The European Commission, the Council of the European Union, and one of the two seats of the European Parliament are all there [5]. NATO's headquarters is also in Brussels. Roughly 40,000 EU staff and tens of thousands more diplomats, journalists, and lobbyists live and work in a few square kilometers of the city.

What surprised me when I visited is how unglamorous the EU quarter looks. Glass office blocks, broad avenues, a few protest signs out front. The medieval Grand Place, a few metro stops away, is the postcard. The cobblestoned square is ringed by guildhalls covered in gold leaf, and UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1998 [6]. Standing there at dusk, with the cafes lit up and a brass band playing somewhere off to the side, you forget for a minute that any of the policy paperwork happens at all.

Ask a Belgian what the country does well and the answer tends to come back as a short list. Beer, chocolate, frites, waffles, comics. Each of those is a real industry with deep roots.

Belgium has more than 400 breweries producing well over a thousand distinct beers, from Trappist ales brewed by monks to lambic sours fermented with wild yeast in the Pajottenland valley west of Brussels [4]. UNESCO added Belgian beer culture to its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2016, recognizing not just the brewing but the rituals around it. Each beer has its own glass. Each glass has its own way of being poured.

Chocolate is the other obsession. Belgium claims the praline, the chocolate shell with a soft filling, which the chocolatier Jean Neuhaus II invented in Brussels in 1912 [7]. Today the country produces around 600,000 tons of chocolate a year, and Brussels Airport sells more chocolate than any other single retail location in the world. Frites, the Belgian fried potato, also belong here. Belgians will tell you, sometimes loudly, that frites are not French and never were. The dish is served from small storefronts called friteries, with a paper cone, a small fork, and your choice of a dozen sauces.

Here's something that'll surprise you if you grew up thinking of comics as kids' stuff. Belgium treats the comic strip as a major literary tradition. The Belgian Comic Strip Center in Brussels, opened in 1989, is housed in a former department store designed by Victor Horta and dedicated entirely to the medium [8]. Tintin, created by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé in 1929, has been translated into more than 70 languages and sold over 230 million copies worldwide. The Smurfs are also Belgian. So is Lucky Luke. Walk through Brussels and you will spot huge painted comic murals on the sides of buildings, part of an official trail the city has been adding to since the early 1990s.

For a country this size, Belgium has produced an outsized share of major painters. The Flemish Primitives in the 15th century, including Jan van Eyck and Hans Memling, helped invent oil painting as we know it. Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted peasants and proverbs in the 1500s. Three centuries later, René Magritte made a career out of bowler hats and apples and quiet absurdity, and his house in Brussels is now a museum [9]. Architecturally, Brussels is also one of the world's great Art Nouveau cities, thanks largely to Victor Horta, whose four surviving townhouses are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Belgium has been fought over for as long as it has been mapped. The country sits on the open plain that armies have used to march between France and Germany for centuries, which is why so many decisive European battles have happened on Belgian soil. Waterloo, where Napoleon was finally defeated in 1815, is in central Belgium. The Western Front of World War I tore through the Ypres area in Flanders, where the British and Commonwealth war cemeteries still hold close to a quarter of a million graves [10]. The Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes forest closed out World War II in Europe.

The country's response to that history is mostly quiet. The Last Post is played every evening at 8 p.m. under the Menin Gate in Ypres, and has been since 1928, with only the four years of German occupation in World War II as an interruption. I had to look this up twice when a friend told me about it. Almost a century of buglers, every single night.

Belgium has three official languages: Dutch, French, and German. Dutch is spoken in the northern region of Flanders, French in the southern region of Wallonia, and German in a small eastern strip near the border. Brussels is officially bilingual in French and Dutch.

Yes, Belgium is a founding member of the European Union and has been part of the bloc since 1958. Brussels hosts the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, and one of the two seats of the European Parliament, making it the de facto capital of the EU.

Belgium is famous for chocolate, beer, frites, waffles, and comics like Tintin and the Smurfs. It is also known for medieval cities like Bruges and Ghent, the EU institutions in Brussels, and a long tradition of painters from Jan van Eyck to René Magritte.

The capital of Belgium is Brussels, a city of roughly 1.2 million people in the country's central region. Brussels is officially bilingual in French and Dutch and serves as the seat of both the federal Belgian government and the main institutions of the European Union.

Belgium has over 400 breweries because brewing traditions there go back to medieval monasteries, particularly Trappist abbeys, and small regional styles were never consolidated by industrial mergers. UNESCO added Belgian beer culture to its intangible cultural heritage list in 2016.

1. Belgium - The World Factbook
2. Belgium Population - World Bank
3. National Bank of Belgium
4. Beer culture in Belgium - UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage
5. Brussels - European Union
6. La Grand-Place, Brussels - UNESCO World Heritage Centre
7. Belgian chocolate - VisitFlanders
8. Belgian Comic Strip Center
9. Magritte Museum - Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium
10. Ypres Salient - Commonwealth War Graves Commission