27 Interesting Facts About Brussels, Fact-Checked

Brussels is a city of 1.25 million people, two official languages and one urinating bronze toddler, and the 27 facts below are the ones that survive a check against the source. Several of the figures that circulate about the Belgian capital do not: it is often called trilingual when it is bilingual, its fry museum is in another city, and the statue everyone photographs is a copy.

Each fact below names its subject, gives the number or date that anchors it, and says where the claim comes from. Where a popular claim turned out to be wrong, the corrected version is here instead of the myth.

Facts about the city and its people

Seven facts explain what Brussels is, who lives in it, what it does for a living and what the weather does, and they are the ones that most often get repeated wrongly.

1. Brussels is two different places with the same name

Brussels means both a region and a city, and the two have different populations. The Brussels-Capital Region is made up of 19 municipalities and had 1,255,795 registered inhabitants in 2025. The City of Brussels is only one of those 19, the one holding the Grand-Place and the Royal Palace, with a population closer to 190,000.

This is why population figures for Brussels vary so wildly between sources. A statistic about “Brussels” can refer to either, and the difference is more than a million people.

2. Brussels has two official languages, not three

The Brussels-Capital Region has been officially bilingual in French and Dutch since its creation in 1989. German is Belgium’s third national language, spoken in the east of the country near the German border, but it has no official status in Brussels. French is the majority language and the working language of the street.

Knowledge of the two is lopsided. In 2024, 81% of residents spoke French well to perfectly, 47% had advanced English and only 22% had that level of Dutch.

3. More than a third of residents hold a foreign passport

Of the region’s 1,255,795 inhabitants in 2025, 467,055 held a nationality other than Belgian, which is 37.2%. Citizens of other EU member states make up the largest share of them, at 291,627. In Ixelles, Etterbeek and Saint-Gilles the figure passes 49%, so those three municipalities are close to half non-Belgian.

Residents of 186 different nationalities were living in Brussels in 2024, speaking 104 languages between them, up from 72 languages in 2001.

4. Brussels was founded in 979

The traditional founding date of Brussels is 979, when a settlement on the river Senne acquired its first fortification. The city grew from a rural stop on the trade route between Bruges and Cologne into the capital of the Duchy of Brabant, then of Belgium, then of the European institutions.

Traces of earlier occupation on the site go back further, but 979 is the date the city itself counts from and the one its anniversaries are hung on.

5. The city’s flower is a yellow iris

The yellow iris is the symbol of the Brussels-Capital Region and appears on its blue flag. The flower is native to the marshy ground along the Senne, which is what the valley looked like before the river was covered over in the 1860s and 1870s.

The City of Brussels flies a different flag: red and green, with Saint Michael, the city’s patron saint, standing over a defeated devil.

6. It rains on about 135 days a year

Brussels records rain on approximately 135 days a year and collects 837 mm (33 in) of it, according to the Royal Meteorological Institute’s 1981 to 2010 normals. The daily mean temperature across the year is 10.9°C (51.7°F), and snow falls on about 17 days.

December and January are the wettest months and April the driest, so the rain is spread through the year rather than concentrated in a season. Pack for showers in July as readily as in November.

7. Brussels runs the European Union and hosts NATO

Brussels is the working capital of the European Union and the seat of NATO, which is what fills the eastern quarter of the city with glass. The European Commission and the Council of the European Union sit here, the European Parliament splits its work between Brussels and Strasbourg, and NATO headquarters stands on the Boulevard Leopold III.

That draws a large press corps, though not the largest in the world as is often claimed. A Council of the European Union study counted 811 journalists accredited to the EU institutions in 2020 and 842 in 2025, down from a peak reached in 2013.

Facts about the landmarks

Eight of the buildings people come to Brussels for carry a fact that is worth knowing before you stand in front of them, and they are listed below in the order you are likely to meet them.

8. The Grand-Place was flattened in 1695 and rebuilt from the ashes

The Grand-Place you photograph is a reconstruction of the years after 1695. On 13 August that year, a French army of 70,000 under the duc de Villeroy bombarded the largely undefended city centre, and only the stone shell of the Town Hall and fragments of a few other buildings were left standing. The guild houses around the square went back up over the following years.

UNESCO inscribed the square as a World Heritage Site in 1998, citing exactly that: a coherent square rebuilt in a single burst after a catastrophe.

9. A carpet of a million flowers covers it every second August

The Grand-Place is covered by a flower carpet in August of every even-numbered year, made from nearly a million begonias or dahlias. The display measures 24 by 77 m (79 by 253 ft), covers 1,800 m² (19,000 sq ft) of the square, stands for three or four days and draws between 150,000 and 200,000 visitors.

The Ghent landscape architect Etienne Stautemans laid the first one in 1971 to advertise his own work. It has been held every two years since 1986, each time on a different theme.

10. The Manneken Pis on the street corner is a copy

The Manneken Pis standing on the corner of the Rue de l’Étuve has been a replica since 1965, and the original is in the Brussels City Museum on the Grand-Place. The statue is 55.5 cm (21.9 in) tall, or 61 cm (24 in) including its base, and the Brabantine sculptor Jérôme Duquesnoy the Elder made the version that was put in place in 1619.

The reason for the swap is that the figure kept being stolen. Some accounts put the total at seven thefts, one of them by Antwerp students who held him for five days in January 1963. His wardrobe now runs to around a thousand costumes, exhibited since 2017 in a museum called GardeRobe MannekenPis on the same street.

11. The Palace of Justice was the largest building in the world

The Palace of Justice covers 26,006 m² (279,930 sq ft) of ground, more than St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and it was the largest building in the world when it was inaugurated on 15 October 1883. Joseph Poelaert designed it and it was built between 1866 and 1883, with a dome that now stands 105 m (344 ft) high and weighs 24,000 tonnes.

Its second claim is less flattering. Scaffolding went up for a renovation in 1984 and much of it is still there, so most people alive have never seen the building bare. In November 2024 the federal government said the first sections would come down within the year and the rest by 2030, a date since pushed back to 2035.

12. The Royal Palace is longer than Buckingham Palace but far smaller

The Royal Palace of Brussels has a façade 50% longer than Buckingham Palace, and that is the fact everyone repeats. The one nobody adds is that its floor area of 33,027 m² (355,500 sq ft) is less than half Buckingham Palace’s 77,000 m² (830,000 sq ft), so the comparison flatters it.

The palace is not where the king lives, either. The royal family moved to the Palace of Laeken in 1935 and the Brussels palace is used for state functions. It opens free to the public from 21 July, Belgian National Day, until early September, a tradition running since 1965, and the ceiling of its Hall of Mirrors is Jan Fabre’s “Heaven of Delight” of 2004, made from more than a million iridescent beetle wing cases.

13. The Koekelberg basilica is the fifth-largest church in the world

The National Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Koekelberg is the fifth-largest church building in the world and one of the largest Art Deco buildings anywhere. Its green copper dome rises 89 m (292 ft) and the building stretches 167 m (548 ft) long.

The panorama terrace under the dome sits at 53 m (174 ft) and gives a full circle of the city, which most visitors to Brussels never see because the basilica is 4 km (2.5 mi) from the Grand-Place and off the standard route.

14. The Atomium is an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times

The Atomium is a unit cell of an iron crystal, blown up 165 billion times. André Waterkeyn engineered it with the architects André and Jean Polak for Expo 58, the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, and it stands 102 m (335 ft) tall with nine steel-clad spheres of 18 m (59 ft) each.

Six of the nine spheres are open to visitors, holding exhibition halls, event space and a restaurant in the top sphere. One of them is a children’s sphere where 6- to 12-year-olds can stay overnight on organised workshops.

15. Europe’s grand shopping arcades copied Brussels, not the other way round

The Royal Saint-Hubert Galleries opened on 20 June 1847, before the famous arcades of Milan, Naples, Saint Petersburg, Moscow and the English industrial cities. Jean-Pierre Cluysenaar designed the 213 m (699 ft) of glazed passage and built it in thirteen months from May 1846, replacing a warren of alleyways the middle classes avoided.

Giuseppe Mengoni visited Brussels and met Cluysenaar before designing the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan in 1867. The Brussels galleries are made of three linked arcades: the King’s, the Queen’s and the Princes’.

Facts about the museums

Brussels holds more museums per resident than almost any capital its size, and two facts cover both the scale of the collection and its single most-visited room.

16. Brussels has more than 100 museums

Brussels has more than 100 museums, and the Brussels Museums association alone brings together over 120 of them. The range runs from the Royal Museums of Fine Arts and the Magritte Museum to the sewer museum, Train World and a museum devoted to a statue’s clothes.

Many of them sit within walking distance of each other on the Mont des Arts, which is the practical way to see several in a day rather than crossing the city between them.

17. The dinosaur hall was filled by one Belgian coal mine

The Dinosaur Hall at the Museum of Natural Sciences spans 4,580 m² (49,300 sq ft) and is the largest of its kind in Europe. Its centrepiece is 30 almost complete Iguanodon skeletons, and all of them came out of a single coal mine at Bernissart in 1878, from a depth of 322 m (1,056 ft).

The palaeontologist Louis Dollo mounted them in the 1880s and set the standard that museums followed for the next century. The institute behind the museum holds around 38 million specimens in total, a figure often misquoted as 38 million species.

Facts about the food and drink

Six food facts follow, and two of them correct a story that gets told about Brussels more often than the truth does.

18. Brussels Airport sells more chocolate than any shop on earth

Brussels Airport is the largest chocolate selling point in the world, moving about 1.5 kg of chocolate a minute. That works out at roughly 2 tonnes a day and more than 800 tonnes a year, most of it bought in the last twenty minutes before a flight.

Chocolate is a serious Belgian export rather than a souvenir industry, which is why the airport shelves are stocked like a supermarket aisle. Our guide to Belgian food covers what to eat before you get to the departures hall.

19. The “Belgian waffle” was named in New York

Belgian waffles got their name in the United States, not in Belgium. Brussels waffles were shown at Expo 58, then taken to the Century 21 Exposition in Seattle in 1962 by Walter Cleyman, and popularised at the 1964 New York World’s Fair by Maurice Vermersch of Brussels.

Vermersch renamed his product the Bel-Gem Waffle after noticing that Americans could not reliably place Brussels as the capital of Belgium. In Brussels itself the waffle you buy is either a Brussels waffle, rectangular and light, or a Liège waffle, denser and studded with pearl sugar.

20. The Belgian claim to inventing fries is shakier than it looks

The story that Belgians invented fries rests on a single unproduced document. The journalist Jo Gérard said a 1781 family manuscript described potatoes being deep-fried in the Meuse valley before 1680, but he never produced it, and the potato did not reach the region until around 1735. The Belgian food historian Pierre Leclercq argues the fry is French in origin and became an emblematic Parisian dish in the 19th century.

None of that stops Belgium from frying better than anyone else. What is worth correcting is the geography: the Frietmuseum is in Bruges, not Brussels, so a fry pilgrimage in the capital means a frietkot rather than a museum. Ask for a mitraillette if you want the local student version, which is fries inside a baguette.

21. Brussels sprouts really are named after Brussels

Brussels sprouts take their name from the city, where they were cultivated from at least the 16th century and possibly as early as the 13th. The vegetable spread through northern Europe from the market gardens around the capital, and the English name simply records where the crop became commercially significant.

Whether the sprout was bred here or only popularised here is still argued over. The name, unlike the fry story, is not in dispute.

22. One Brussels bar holds the world record for the most beers

Delirium Café in central Brussels holds the Guinness World Record for the most varieties of beer commercially available, at 2,004 counted on 9 January 2004. The bar keeps 27 beers on tap alongside the bottled list, which covers Trappists, lambics and abbey beers.

The record has stood for more than two decades. Belgium’s beer culture as a whole was added to UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage in 2016, so the bar is the loud end of something the country takes seriously.

23. You can eat a seven-course dinner on a moving tram

The Tram Experience serves a 6- or 7-course menu on a converted historic STIB tram that circles the south and east of Brussels while you eat. Menus are created by leading Belgian chefs, and the tram runs a defined season each year rather than year-round: in 2026 it ran from 28 August to 11 October.

Seats have to be booked in advance and the tram departs from Place Poelaert. It is the only restaurant in the city where the view changes between courses.

Facts about the people and the calendar

Four facts cover who came from Brussels, who came to it, and the one Sunday a year when the whole region changes shape.

24. Audrey Hepburn was born in Brussels

Audrey Hepburn was born in Brussels on 4 May 1929, in the municipality of Ixelles. She spent her childhood between Belgium, England and the Netherlands, and the years in occupied Arnhem shaped the humanitarian work she gave the second half of her life to.

Other countries claim her regularly, which happens to Belgians a lot. She sits on our list of famous people in Belgium alongside Jacques Brel and René Magritte.

25. Charlotte and Emily Brontë went to school here

Charlotte and Emily Brontë travelled to Brussels in 1842 to study at the Pensionnat Heger, a girls’ boarding school run by Constantin Heger and his wife Claire. They taught English and music in return for board while improving their own French, hoping to open a school of their own.

Charlotte returned alone in January 1843 to take a teaching post and left in January 1844. Both The Professor and Villette draw on the experience, and Constantin Heger fed the character of Rochester in Jane Eyre. The school is gone, buried under the Palais des Beaux-Arts, and the Brontë Society placed a commemorative plaque on the building in 1979.

26. Half the exiles of 19th-century Europe passed through

Brussels took in political exiles and writers all through the 19th century, including Victor Hugo, Karl Marx, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. Marx wrote in Brussels during his years in the city, and Verlaine shot Rimbaud in a Brussels hotel room in July 1873, which ended both the relationship and Verlaine’s liberty.

Belgium’s liberal press laws and its position on the doorstep of France made it the obvious refuge. The traces are mostly plaques rather than museums.

27. The entire region bans cars for one Sunday a year

Brussels closes the whole Brussels-Capital Region to motor traffic for one Sunday each September, from 9.30am to 7pm. In 2026 that Sunday is 20 September, and the organisers describe it as the largest car-free area in Europe on the day.

Streets fill with cyclists, skaters, street furniture and pop-up events, and public transport runs. It is worth planning around in either direction: brilliant if you want the city on foot, awkward if you were driving anywhere.

Planning a trip around these facts

Two of the facts above are date-locked, so a trip built around them needs the calendar checked first. The Flower Carpet only appears in even-numbered years, the Royal Palace only opens between 21 July and early September, and the Tram Experience runs an autumn season.

Brussels is one of the easiest European capitals to reach without flying, since high-speed lines run in from London, Paris, Amsterdam and Cologne into Brussels-Midi. Comparing train tickets to Brussels across operators is usually cheaper than buying on the day, and the station puts you two metro stops from the Grand-Place.

Guided walks are the quickest way to link the landmarks in this list, because the Grand-Place, Manneken Pis, the Galeries Royales and the Town Hall sit within a few hundred metres of each other while the Atomium and the basilica do not.

Where you sleep decides how much of this you see on foot. The Pentagon, the old city centre inside the ring road, puts most of the landmarks within walking distance, while the European Quarter is quieter and better connected to the museums in Leopold Park. Compare hotels across Belgium once your dates are set, since Brussels prices swing with the summit calendar rather than the tourist season.

Brussels FAQ

What are the top attractions to visit in Brussels?

The three attractions that no first visit to Brussels skips are the Grand-Place, the Atomium and the Royal Saint-Hubert Galleries. The Grand-Place is the UNESCO-listed square rebuilt after 1695 and the centre of the old town. The Atomium is the Expo 58 landmark on the Heysel plateau, reached by metro line 6. The galleries are the 1847 arcades linking the Grand-Place to the upper town, and they cost nothing to walk through. Our full list of attractions to visit in Brussels covers the rest of the city.

Where should you stay in Brussels?

Stay inside the Pentagon if you want to walk to the landmarks, and in the European Quarter if you want quiet and the museums. The Pentagon covers the Grand-Place, Sainte-Catherine and the Sablon, and hotel prices there rise fastest at weekends. Our guide to where to stay in Brussels sets out the neighbourhoods and the hotels in each.

What is the best time to visit Brussels?

April and May are the best months to visit Brussels, because the daily mean climbs to 10.4°C (50.7°F) in April and 13.9°C (57.0°F) in May while April is the driest month of the year at 46.7 mm (1.84 in). Summer is warmer, with a July daily mean of 18.7°C (65.7°F), but also wetter than spring and busier.

Two dates pull visits into other months. The Flower Carpet takes over the Grand-Place in mid-August of even-numbered years, and the Christmas market runs through December.

What is the worst time to visit Brussels?

November to February is the hardest stretch, with daily means between 3.7°C (38.7°F) and 7.2°C (45.0°F), rain on 17 to 19 days a month and under 60 hours of sunshine in December and January. Short daylight matters as much as the cold, since the light goes by mid-afternoon.

December is the exception, when the Christmas market and the light show on the Grand-Place give the city a reason to be out in the dark.

WonderfulWanderings Pro Tips

The 5 tips below come from checking each fact on this page against its own source, and each one changes what a visitor should do rather than just what they know.

1. See the real Manneken Pis, then his wardrobe. The statue on the street corner has been a replica since 1965. The 1619 original is in the Brussels City Museum on the Grand-Place, and around a thousand of his costumes are on show in GardeRobe MannekenPis on the same street as the fountain.
2. The Royal Palace opens for about six weeks a year. Entry is free from 21 July, Belgian National Day, to early September, and that is the only window for seeing Jan Fabre’s beetle-wing ceiling in the Hall of Mirrors. Outside it you get the façade and the guard.
3. Check whether your August is an even-numbered year. The Flower Carpet fills the Grand-Place for three or four days in August of even years only, so 2026 had one and 2027 does not. Book a room overlooking the square early, because the view from the Town Hall balcony sells out.
4. Book the Tram Experience before you arrive, and check it is in season. The dining tram runs a fixed season rather than all year: in 2026 it ran from 28 August to 11 October, with 6- and 7-course menus and a lunch service, departing from Place Poelaert.
5. Do not plan to drive on the September car-free Sunday. On 20 September 2026 the whole Brussels-Capital Region is closed to motor traffic from 9.30am to 7pm. Arriving by car that day means parking outside the region, so come in by train and enjoy the emptiest streets of the year.

About the author. This guide is written and maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, who is Belgian, grew up in Leuven and worked at the Belga Press Agency in Brussels, so the capital in this post is a city she has lived and worked in rather than one she passed through. The team covers Brussels for independent travellers, including the museums, food, hotels and rail routes worth booking, and re-checks the figures on this page against their sources when they change.