Antwerp

Antwerp's diamond district, a tightly concentrated four-block area near the city's central train station, handles a genuinely outsized share of the global diamond trade — an estimated 84% of the world's rough diamonds and roughly half of all polished diamonds pass through it at some point, a level of concentration built on more than 500 years of continuous trading history dating back to the city's peak as a major Renaissance-era commercial hub.

That same Renaissance wealth shaped much of Antwerp's historic center, and no single figure looms larger over the city's artistic legacy than Peter Paul Rubens, the most influential Flemish Baroque painter, who lived and worked in Antwerp for most of his career. The Rubens House, his actual preserved home and studio, gives a rare, intimate look at how a major 17th-century artist genuinely lived, and the Cathedral of Our Lady holds several of his most significant altarpieces in the settings they were originally created for.

The cathedral itself, a Gothic structure begun in the 14th century and never fully completed as originally planned, remains one of the largest and most architecturally significant Gothic churches in the Low Countries, its single completed spire visible across much of the city.

Along the waterfront, the MAS (Museum aan de Stroom), a striking modern building completed in 2011, gives Antwerp a contemporary counterpoint to its historic core — its free public rooftop terrace offers one of the better panoramic views over the city and the Scheldt river without an entry fee.

Antwerp has also built a genuine reputation as a fashion and design hub since the 1980s, when a group of graduates from the city's Royal Academy of Fine Arts — later dubbed the "Antwerp Six" — gained international recognition, and that design identity continues to shape the city's shopping streets and cultural scene today, giving Antwerp a distinctly different character from the more purely historic old towns found elsewhere in Belgium.