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ANTWERP by foot, discovering its insolent and secret treasures

Antwerp Zoological garden

Antwerp by foot, discovering its insolent and secret treasures

Introducing the walk Keyserley-Leysstraat-Meir

Meir shopping, slowly loitering to Rubens house

Rubens, his life and his house

Bird market-Bourla theatre - more shopping

Shopping streets to Groenplaats

Area around Antwerp Cathedral   

Cathedral of Our-Lady

Grote Markt and Town hall

Guild houses-Vlaaykensgang 

Hoogstraat and Grote Pieter Potstraat

Printers museum Plantin-Moretus

Museum Mayer van den Bergh-Maagdenhuis

Strolling to the Carolus Borromeus church

Rockoxhuis- Rubens tomb at St.Jacobskerk

Cogels-Osylei area, unique in the world (1)

Cogels Osy area, unique in the world (2)

A city like Antwerp, and many others of the same size, can only be discovered on foot. To guide you through this amazing and underestimated city I choose a few promenades to show you the Antwerp I live and was born in.
We will loaf about the streets paved with centennial stones, the concrete of the new ones, the gravel of the Antwerp Zoo (the oldest in Europe, 1843), the marble of the churches, the inlaid floor of the museums, while our eyes and brains will discover facades and buildings, paintings of great masters, exotic animals, wealthy and luxurious shops, centennial pietas, shortly said: all art and money has realized since the prestigious soar after the discovering of America.

History, with its peaks and downs, will be the background of the proposed promenades: because it determined the settling in Antwerp of a printer coming from Tours, Plantin, a painter born in Koln, Rubens, and the exodus of the Calvinists after the Spanish and catholic victory of Alexander Farnése in 1585, the development of the port decided by Napoleon in 1803 to point Antwerp as a deadly pistol to the heart of England, or the sinister revenge of the nazis, bombing the city with V1 and V2, furious that two courageous resistant tricked them and delivered the harbor intact to the allied forces. Thus, Antwerp served as the main entrance point for all the provisioning of the northern war front.

I will guide you through the meanders of a creative and baroque city, laborious and bourgeois, cosmopolite and provincial, all in contrasts. Maybe it's that provincialism which is responsible of the fact that Antwerp never became a myth like Amsterdam or Venice?
But how can we resist to the insolent and secret wealth of a past in constant metamorphosis? Take now the first ever built sky-scraper in Europe (“Boerentoren” built in 1933) which dominates, located in the “Schoenmarkt”, a miniscule 15th century Burgundian chapel where the candles blink the peaceful look of a suffering Virgin. And the maneuvers of the largest and biggest river lock in the world, in Berendrecht, brings prosperity as well as the delicate cutting and sale of diamonds. You can meet Hassidic Jews, dressed as they were in the Polish ghettos, and of the most mystic tendencies all over the world (with the New-York Hassidim), as well as “heavy guys” and almost naked girls in high heels and display windows around “Falconplein”, even taking you by taxi to the far end of the port near the Dutch border to have some fun (?)

It seems evident to me that that most of the visitors will leave a bit of admiration out of their heart in Antwerp. They will see the monumental staircase and main hall of Central Station (in full building works to receive the TGV in 2003), the architectural purity of the cathedral, the festive colors of Jordaens, the gable end houses of the old ship quarter, entirely renovated and packed with trendy small shops, restaurants cafes, and buzzing of activity at night, the joyful delirium of the Art Nouveau buildings and houses in the streets around the Cogels-Osylei. 
They will be charmed by the call of the sirens or mist-horns, the wind bringing them the odours of caulker-tar. And lot will, leaving the city, that you only leave Antwerp to return one day.