A very lively neighbourhood with a lot of bars and restaurants can be found at Dageraadplaats, which is the heart of Zurenborg. It may be little known by tourists, but is frequented by locals. This is an area where people of different origins live together, and it shows in the types of restaurants you can find at and around this little square.
The square can easily be reached by public transport (Line 11 has a stop at the square). Moreover, just a few steps away is Cogels-Osylei, a city quarter that was developed in the era of art nouveau and Jugendstil. Fortunately practically all of the houses in this street, and the sidestreets leading up to it, have been protected as monuments. It surely is a unique sight.
Soon I will tell you more about this fascinating area.
The most famous name in Antwerp history is undoubtedly Peter Paul Rubens, the Baroque painter.
Come visit Antwerp to (re)discover the master and his works.
Rubens statue at Groenplaats
See his statue, erected to commemorate the 200th anniversary of his death in 1840. The Rubens statue stands in the middle of Groenplaats, one of the city’s busiest places. A popular meeting place for people from Antwerp to start an evening out or a walk in the historic heart of the city.
Behind the statue you can admire the spire of the Our Lady’s Chathedral. Don’t forget to visit the cathedral, as it contains not less than 4 paintings by the master, besides a great many other works of art.
Nearby, just off the busy shopping avenue of Meir, on a square called Wapper, you can find the master’s house which now houses a museum completely devoted to Rubens and his works.
Just a few 100 meters away at Sint-Jacobsmarkt, is Saint James’s church where Rubens was buried. The chapel where the Rubens family was buried is adorned with a painting the master himself selected for his resting place.
Saint Carl Borromeus Church
Not to be missed is the phenomenal Saint Carl Borromeus church, the former jesuit’s church at Conscienceplein. Unfortunately the painted ceilings Rubens provided for this church were lost in a fire, but there are strong signs Rubens contributed to both the façade and the tower of this masterpiece of baroque architecture.
Not so far away, the old dominican church, Saint Paul’s, next to the red light quarter, houses works by Rubens and some of his contemporaries.
Of course many of the other Antwerp museums show works by Rubens, such as the Fine Arts Museum (closed for intensive restauration works until 2019), the Museum Plantin-Moretus (Christoff Plantin was a close friend of Rubens’), the museum Rockoxhuis, …
Antwerp has a very lively night-life, with two very popular discotheques bordering north of the historical city centre.
Foto: kioni papadopoulos, rr
In the middle of the red light quarter (Schipperskwartier) you’ll find “Café d’Anvers”. Situated in Verversrui the building once housee the popular cinema Ritz, where the poor of the neighbourhood used to hang out the whole afternoon no matter which movie was on the program to save on heating costs in their two room flats, but now welcomes trendy crowds of visitors every weekend.
A bit further on in the Lange Schipperskapelstraat, “Red and Blue” can be found. This last one was very popular with the holebi-population of Flanders. From the middle of January 2017 on, “Red and Blue” will be renamed “Cargo Club” and cater for all kinds of public. Every now and then special holebi-events will be staged under the old “Red and Blue” logo.
Should you visit Antwerp later this year, you will undoubtedly be confronted with road works and the like, which results in traffic problems every now and then, but don’t forget that every cloud has a silver lining.
Our silver lining is that the road works in the Opera quarter and in the South quarter will teach us a lot about the town’s history, and not only that: parts of the city’s history that have lain hidden for hundreds of years will again become visible. One more reason to come and visit Antwerp.
The Antwerp Opera is built along a city boulevard that in the sixteenth century was an enormous defensive wall. Recently Rough Guide chose Antwerp as its #5 city to visit in 2017, in the 16th century, an Italian named Guiccardini advised each and every European to visit Antwerp and its defensive wall. The people of Antwerp usually refer to this wall as the Spaanse Vesten (Spanish Walls) as the Netherlands then were part of the reign of Charles V and his son Filip II.
In the 19th century these walls no longer served a defensive role and in stead were a hindrance in the development of the city which was booming thanks to the newly (re)started harbour activities, so the walls were broken down. Fortunately they were only demolished up to ground level: the basements underground were left intact and archeological studies now are revealing these impressive works.
Part of an old bastion in the Spanish Walls laid bare.This is what the Opera Square will look like when all the works are finished.
Yesterday (Jan. 5 2017) the city authorities and the Flemish government announced Antwerp is going to be the first smart city in Flanders. In cooperation with IMEC, an organisation of IT-departments of Flemish univerities, the city of Antwerp is going to integrate smart sensors in hundreds of objects: waste baskets, sewers, delivery vans, traffic lights, …
Sensors in waste baskets can trigger messages to warn it is time to come and collect the waste. Sensors in the sewers can monitor the quality of rain water, which yields a lot of information about the quality of the environment in general, sensors in delivery vans can measure the quality of the air in the city, sensors combined with traffic lights deliver information which can be used to steer traffic flows in an optimal way, …
All the data collected allow for a more efficient organisation of city life and as the system is an open system anyone can use them to build his own apps.
Antwerp is the first city in Europe to host such a system, which in time will be rolled out in all Flemish cities, says Flemish Minister of Innovations Philippe Muyters.
In Belgium movies are shown in the original language and are subtitled for the local public, so there’s no reason why you should not go to the movies on Saturday night.
Antwerp has always had a fascination for cinema. Already early in 1896 performances were offered to an eager public, barely months after the first performances by the Lumière brothers in Paris. Already in 1908 Antwerp had its own cinemas and in the era immediately before and immediately after World War II the city housed more than 100 cinemas. But then television came and cinema lost much of its appeal and in 1973 the main cinema mogul in Antwerp went bankrupt.
Fortunately the multiplex took over and Antwerp now has two large cinema centres: one in the Central Station area (historically the place where the main cinemas were situated) run by UGC, the other north of the city along Noorderlaan, on a former GMC-plant run by Kinepolis. Both offer a varied programme of mostly English spoken movies.
Independent productions are shown in Cartoon’s, which is situated in Kaasstraat, bordering on the quays of the river Scheldt.
One of the key figures in the history of Antwerp is Christophe Plantin. He was a French bookbinder who decided to come to the booming town of his day, Antwerp, and try his luck there around 1548. There’s a story that tells that one night, while he was delivering books to a client, he was attacked, robbed and stabbed in the shoulder. The injury made that he couldn’t practice his job as a bookbinder anymore, so he chose a new profession and became a printer.
Print shop (Kunst en Erfgoed)
He could have made a worse decision. His printshop was a huge success, he set up printshops in Paris and Leiden, and became friends with the important people of his days like e.g. Rubens. After his death the shop was taken over by his son in law Johan Moerentorf, who, as was custom in those days had changed his name into Moretus. The Moretus family kept on printing for almost three centuries, but eventually new technologies took over and the family left the building and all its contents to the city on condition that it be turned into a museum.
The museum not only gives one a unique insight into the history of printing, but it is also a lively showcase of how people used to live in the sixteenth century. Some of the printing presses are still in working order, and if you book it in advance, the visit to the museum can be completed with a real printing workshop in which you will print your own document on a replica of the ancient presses.
The inner garden of the Plantin-Moretus museum
Recently the exposition has been completely renewed, and should you pass the museum, which is situated at Vrijdagmarkt, but run out of time and be unable to visit it, feel free to take a look at the inner garden.
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A very lively neighbourhood with a lot of bars and restaurants can be found at Dageraadplaats, which is the heart of Zurenborg. It may be little known by tourists, but is frequented by locals. This is an area where people of different origins live together, and it shows in the types of restaurants you can find at and around this little square.
