"Somewhere within the dingy
casing lay the ancient city",
wrote Graham Greene of
BRUGES
, "like a notorious jewel, too
stared at, talked of, trafficked
over." And it's true that
Bruges' reputation as one of the
most perfectly preserved medieval
cities in western Europe has made it
the most popular tourist destination
in Belgium, packed with visitors
throughout the summer. Inevitably,
the crowds tend to overwhelm the
town's charms, but you would be mad
to come to Flanders and miss the
place: its museums, to name just one
attraction, hold some of the
country's finest collections of
Flemish art; and its intimate,
winding streets, woven around a
pattern of narrow canals and lined
with gorgeous ancient buildings,
live up to even the most inflated
hype.
By the fourteenth century Bruges
shared effective control of the
cloth trade with its two great
rivals, Ghent and Ypres, turning
high-quality English wool into
thousands of items of clothing that
were exported all over the known
world. It was an immensely
profitable business, and made the
city a centre of international
trade: at its height, the town was a
key member of the Hanseatic League,
the most powerful economic alliance
in medieval Europe. By the end of
the fifteenth century, though,
Bruges was in decline, partly
because of a recession in the cloth
trade, but principally because the
Zwin river - the city's vital link
to the North Sea - was silting up.
By the 1530s the town's sea trade
had collapsed completely, and Bruges
simply withered away. Frozen in
time, Bruges escaped damage in both
world wars to emerge the perfect
tourist attraction.
The City
The older sections of Bruges fan out
from two central squares, Markt and
Burg. Markt , edged on three sides
by nineteenth-century gabled
buildings, is the larger of the two,
an impressive open space, on the
south side of which the octagonal
...
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