The Royal Palace and the park of 1830

In front of you stretches the official façade of the Belgian monarchy. But the king doesn’t sleep here: he lives at the Château de Laeken, north of the city. This is his workplace, where he receives ambassadors and holds audiences.

1A palace made of houses

The building was not born of a single design. At its core are eighteenth-century mansions built after the fire that destroyed the old Coudenberg palace, linked together in the time of William I of the Netherlands. Leopold II, the builder king, transformed it on a grand scale and commissioned the present façade from Henri Maquet. The work was not fully finished until the reign of Albert I.

2Fighting in the park

The park behind you, laid out in the eighteenth century with geometric avenues, saw the hardest fighting of September 1830. Dutch troops dug in there and the revolutionaries harried them for several days until they withdrew. It was a decisive victory for independence.

By custom, the flag above the palace signals that the king is in the country.

Every summer since 1965, the palace has opened its state rooms to the public. One of them has a ceiling covered with more than a million beetle wing cases, a work by the artist Jan Fabre.

3What to look for

• The flag above the façade.
• The central pediment, with its sculpted group.
• The axis of the park, linking the palace to Parliament at the far end.