The places that make Brussels: Grand-Place, Atomium, Cinquantenaire and more, with what is on there next.
The main square, on UNESCO's World Heritage list since 1998. The Gothic Town Hall has a tower of about 96 metres with Saint Michael on top, and the guild houses around it were rebuilt after the bombardment of 1695. In winter the Christmas tree stands here; every other August there is a carpet of flowers.
The 102-metre model of an iron crystal built for Expo 58, on the Heysel. Six of the nine steel spheres are open, with exhibitions inside and a restaurant with a view of the city in the top one. Metro line 6 stops nearby.
The park built for Belgium's 50th birthday, with a triumphal arch finished in 1905 and a bronze chariot on top. The halls on either side hold the Art & History Museum, Autoworld and the military history museum.
A glass-roofed shopping arcade from 1847, just off the Grand-Place: three galleries, about 200 metres long, with some seventy shops, cafés, a theatre and the Cinéma Galeries. Dry on a rainy day.
The little bronze boy on the corner of Rue de l'Étuve, five minutes from the Grand-Place. The one on the street is a copy; the 1619 original is in the Brussels City Museum, and around a thousand of his costumes are in the GardeRobe MannekenPis.
Some 200 works by René Magritte on the Place Royale, part of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, which also hold the Old Masters and Bruegel.
Belgian comics from Tintin to the Smurfs, in an Art Nouveau department store by Victor Horta from 1906 on Rue des Sables.
The natural history museum in Leopold Park, by the European Parliament. Its dinosaur hall, one of the largest in the world, shows some thirty iguanodon skeletons found in a Belgian coal mine.
