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FrançaisFloralia Brussels is the spring flower show held in the private park of Groot-Bijgaarden Castle, 7 km (4.3 mi) west of Brussels, and it runs for about a month from early April. More than a million flower bulbs go into the ground each autumn for it, and adult entry is €18 (about $20, £15). The 2026 edition ran from Friday 3 April to Sunday 3 May, with the park open from 10:00 to 18:00 and the ticket office closing at 17:30; the organisers publish the following spring’s dates on the Floralia Brussels website.
Come for the tulips and stay for the castle. The park is private for the rest of the year, so the flower show and the autumn pumpkin event are the only two times the gates open, and the walk through the grounds takes about 90 minutes over roughly 2 km (1.2 mi).
Floralia Brussels is not the Ghent Floraliën
Two Belgian flower shows have confusingly similar names, and this page is about the one near Brussels. The difference is worth getting right before you book a train.
- Floralia Brussels is annual, outdoors, and held in the park of Groot-Bijgaarden Castle just west of Brussels, from early April to early May. It is a bulb show: tulips, daffodils and hyacinths planted in the ground.
- Floraliën Ghent is quadrennial, indoors, and held in Ghent, in the Floraliënhal, the Kuipke and the botanical garden in the Kunstenkwartier-Citadelpark. It is a florists’ and growers’ exhibition that runs for 10 days. The most recent edition ran from Friday 1 May to Sunday 10 May 2026, which on the usual four-year cycle puts the next one in 2030.
If you searched for the Ghent Floraliën and landed here, the event you want is in Ghent and it is years away. If you want tulips this spring, keep reading.
What is Floralia Brussels?
Floralia Brussels is a spring bulb exhibition laid out across the private park of Groot-Bijgaarden Castle, and it has won the World Tulip Award as Belgium’s largest tulip celebration. Floralia Brussels works with a Dutch flower bulb producer and exporter, whose specialists spend the year selecting varieties for colour range and flowering time, and more than a million bulbs are planted for each season. The set pieces are the flower carpets under the old beech trees, the landscaped beds across the estate, the heart of red tulips and the labyrinth.
Nothing blooms all at once, which is the single most useful thing to know before choosing a date. The organisers plant early, mid and late varieties deliberately, so crocuses, daffodils and hyacinths carry the opening days, tulips, grape hyacinths and Fritillaria imperialis take over around mid-April, and the late tulips hold on into the end of the month. Weather moves all of it, and even the organisers will not promise a peak date.
The Grand Greenhouse
Go into the Grand Greenhouse when the weather turns, because Belgium in April does what Belgium in April does. The greenhouse holds a separate exhibition of floral arrangements and decorative plants, built from a mix of fresh and silk flowers and refreshed weekly by the artist’s team. For the 2026 season the Belgian floral artist Diederick Daneels of Viva Blooming designed it around a Maya the Bee installation aimed at children. The cafeteria sits next to the greenhouses, which makes this corner of the park the natural place to stop.
The Venetian Parade
Plan a weekend visit if you want the Venetian Parade, the show’s most photographed event. It is less a parade than a group of performers in Venetian costume and masks who move through the gardens singly and in pairs, and they pose patiently for anyone with a camera. In 2026 the parade ran on Saturday 25 and Sunday 26 April, from 10:30 to 12:00 and again from 14:30 to 16:30. Those days are the busiest of the season and worth it anyway, though the photographers can get territorial.
Maya Days
Bring children on a Maya Day, when Maya the Bee and Willy appear in the park with a small parade and a meet-and-greet. Maya Days are ticketed separately from ordinary admission, with a family pack covering one adult and one child and add-on rates for extra adults, children and seniors. The dates are set each season and published on the Floralia Brussels site alongside the Venetian Parade dates. The Maya theme carries through into the Grand Greenhouse installation.
Groot-Bijgaarden Castle and its park
Groot-Bijgaarden Castle is a moated Flemish Renaissance house with a medieval keep, and it is the backdrop to every photograph anyone takes at Floralia. A five-arch bridge headed by two 17th-century heraldic lions leads to a drawbridge and a fortified entrance from the 15th century, and the moat reflects beech trees that are centuries old. The castle building itself went up in the 17th century: a long red-brick range with white stone window surrounds and a blue slate roof, a chapel in the right wing that has not changed in three centuries, and a bulb-shaped roof over the left wing.
The oldest part is the donjon, the keep beside the fortified entrance, built around 1347 and standing 30 m (98 ft) high with walls 2 m thick. It has four floors and a roof terrace, and the view from the top reaches the Atomium and the Brussels skyline. The castle interior is reserved for private and corporate events rather than open to ticket holders, so the donjon and the park are what a Floralia ticket buys you. Raymond Pelgrims de Bigard, who bought the badly decayed estate in 1902 and spent about three decades restoring it, is the reason there is anything left to look at; the park landscaping is credited to the 19th-century architect Louis Fuchs, who also laid out the Parc du Waux-Hall in Mons.
The estate has stopped being a spring-only venue. Pumpkimania, an autumn event of forest sculptures decorated with pumpkins, runs in the same park from Friday 25 September to Sunday 1 November 2026, closed Mondays to Wednesdays until 23 October and open daily from 24 October with an hour added at the end of the day. The gates now open twice a year rather than once.
Floralia Brussels tickets and prices
Adult admission is €18 and children under 6 go free. The 2026 rates for ordinary admission days, which exclude Maya Days, are listed below.
| Ticket | Price | Approximate |
|---|---|---|
| Adult | €18 | about $20, £15 |
| Senior 65+, student 13 to 18, disabled visitor | €16 | about $18, £14 |
| Child 6 to 12 | €9 | about $10, £8 |
| Under 6 | Free | Free |
| Group of 20 or more, per person | €16 | about $18, £14 |
| Season subscription, valid every event day | €32 | about $35, £27 |
Buy online rather than at the gate. Popular dates sell out and the box office only sells what is left, though you can change your visiting date yourself through the link on your ticket. Tickets are not refundable in any other circumstance, and they scan from a phone screen, so there is no need to print them. The subscription is worth it if you plan to come twice to catch different flowering stages, since two adult tickets already cost €36 (about $40, £31).
Practical information for visiting Floralia
The park is at Isidoor van Beverenstraat 5, 1702 Groot-Bijgaarden, and the visit takes most people about an hour and a half. The details that catch people out are listed below.
- Opening times: gates open at 10:00, last entry is 17:30 and the park closes at 18:00.
- Route length: the walking route runs to roughly 2 km (1.2 mi) on gravel paths, which is why bicycles, scooters and children’s steps are not allowed inside.
- Dogs: dogs are welcome on a leash, and owners are asked to clean up after them.
- Food and drink: the cafeteria beside the greenhouses serves snacks and hot dishes and takes cash, Bancontact and cards.
- Toilets: toilets are on site and cost 50 cents a visit, so carry coins.
- Smoking: smoking and vaping are not allowed anywhere on the castle grounds, indoors or out.
- Accessibility: the park is passable for wheelchairs and mobility scooters, the stairs can all be avoided, and the person accompanying a disabled visitor enters free without a ticket. The entrance bridge is cobbled and easier pulled than pushed.
- Photography: cameras are encouraged, which is unusual enough among ticketed gardens to be worth saying.
How do you get to Groot-Bijgaarden?
Take public transport, because parking at the castle is the hardest part of the day. Groot-Bijgaarden station is a 10-minute walk from the entrance and sits on the Belgian rail network, so you can come straight from Brussels; timetables and fares are on the Belgian railway site. De Lijn buses R36 from Brussels South, R15 from Brussels North and R10 from Halle all stop at Church (Groot-Bijgaarden), and Brussels tram 9 from Simonis stops at Dansaertpark, from where you walk down Guido Gezellestraat and Brusselstraat to the castle.
Drive only on a weekday. The car park is the field across the entrance bridge, with disabled parking in the same field, and when the meadows are too wet the parking staff redirect drivers to the Alley, to Alfons Gossetlaan 15 to 20 minutes away on foot, or at weekends and on public holidays to the Brico City, Deer and Hocké car parks 15 to 30 minutes away. Parking in the surrounding streets, on verges or on municipal grass is forbidden and the police fine or tow, so on a weekend it is better to aim for one of the outlying car parks from the start.
Where to stay and what else to see
Base yourself in Brussels rather than in Groot-Bijgaarden, since the castle sits in a commuter village with almost nothing around it and the city is 7 km (4.3 mi) away. A Brussels hotel puts you within half an hour of the gate by train or tram and gives you somewhere to eat afterwards; compare rates across the country on the Belgium hotel map.
Floralia also pairs well with the rest of Belgium’s gardens and castles. The National Botanical Garden of Meise is on the other side of Brussels and open all year, the botanical garden in Leuven is the oldest in Belgium, and Groot-Bijgaarden is one of many castles in Belgium worth a detour. If tulips are the point of the trip, Keukenhof in the Netherlands is the bigger version of the same idea and runs over roughly the same weeks. Our guide to Belgium covers the rest of the country.
Travel insurance for Belgium
Insure the trip, because a flower show is weather-dependent and a spring city break has more moving parts than it looks. A cancelled train, a lost bag or an injury abroad is the ordinary case. SafetyWing sells flexible plans that you can start after you have already left home, and they were the first travel insurer to cover COVID. When I caught it, they reimbursed my expenses without an argument.
WonderfulWanderings Pro Tips
The 4 tips below come from a visit on the Venetian Parade weekend and from the organisers’ own 2026 ticketing and parking rules, which have changed since most write-ups of this show were published.
- Buy the ticket online before you leave home. Popular dates sell out and the box office only sells whatever is left, which is the opposite of the older advice that you can simply turn up. You can move your own visiting date through the link on the ticket, but there is no refund otherwise, and the ticket scans from a phone screen.
- Take the train, or aim straight for an outlying car park. Groot-Bijgaarden station is 10 minutes away on foot. If you drive at a weekend, go directly to the Brico City, Deer or Hocké car parks 15 to 30 minutes away rather than circling the entrance, because parking in the surrounding streets, on verges or on municipal grass is forbidden and the police fine or tow.
- Come on the Venetian Parade weekend and let the photographers get on with it. The costumed performers move through the gardens in ones and twos and pose patiently for anybody with a camera, which is what makes those two days the strongest photography of the season and the most crowded. Some of the photographers get territorial about their shot; it is still the weekend to pick.
- Do not wait for a peak week, because there isn’t one. The planting is designed to flower in stages across the month, which is why the organisers never single one week out. If you want two different displays, the €32 season subscription costs less than two adult tickets at €18 each.
About the author. This guide is written and maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, and the first-hand notes in this post come from her own visit to Floralia Brussels on the weekend of the Venetian Parade. The team covers Belgium for independent travellers, including the gardens, castles, hotels and events worth planning a spring trip around, and checks the dates, opening hours and ticket prices on this page against the organisers’ own sites.
Hoe kan het dat ik hier niets over wist! Ik ga er zeker naartoe, want ik ben een echte bloemenliefhebber! Je hebt trouwens ook super mooie foto’s gemaakt :) xo
Hihihi, blij dat je het via mij te weten gekomen bent ;-)
Als je gaat, laat me dan zeker weten wat je ervan vond! Ik zou misschien wel nog een weekje wachten. Ik denk dat er dan meer in bloei zal staan.
En dankje! Ik ben aan het proberen men fotografie wat te verbeteren. Dat gebeurt met veel geknoei:)
What a beautiful spot … thanks for sharing it!
You’re very welcome!
Verry good Content For Reading , thanks for sharing with us
Schoonheid des blik,blik op den schoonheid
Altijd zo fantastisch mooi met zoveel
Bloemetjes en ventiaanse mooie gekleed
Man en vrouw,
Zoals des wereld op zijns best,
Kussen aan de al de mooiste plekjes
Nog heel grote dank voor alles goeds,
Hoogachtend
Annie fischler van berghem antwerpen
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