Notre-Dame du Sablon and the Virgin who came by boat

In front of you rises the most delicate Gothic church in Brussels, and it all began with a miracle. Or at least with a story the city has been telling for almost seven centuries.

1The crossbowmen’s chapel

The documented facts are modest. In 1304 the crossbowmen’s guild, the Grand Serment, was given land here from the old cemetery of St John’s hospital and built a small chapel to the Virgin. They practised their shooting on this sandy ground, the sablon. In 1348 a statuette of the Virgin arrived at the chapel and drew so many offerings that it paid for the great fifteenth-century church.

2The legend of Béatrice Soetkens

According to tradition, the Virgin appeared to a devout woman from Antwerp, Béatrice Soetkens, and told her to take her image to Brussels. She took it from the church in Antwerp and set off by boat with her husband. When he was too exhausted to row any further, the boat carried on by itself to Brussels, where the crossbowmen received the image.

Tradition holds that the promise to carry the image in procession every year gave rise to the Ommegang, Brussels’ great historical pageant.

The statuette has not survived: Calvinists destroyed it in the late sixteenth century. Inside the church, a large carved boat recalls the legend. The Ommegang is still held every summer and, in 1549, it was staged for Charles V.

3What to look for

• The windows, which glow from inside after dark.
• The statues on the façades, added in the twentieth century.
• The Grand Sablon, the crossbowmen’s former training ground.