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The Hergé Museum is the Tintin museum, and it sits at Rue du Labrador 26 in Louvain-la-Neuve, about 30 km (18.6 miles) south-east of Brussels. Allow two hours, download the free audio guide app before you leave home, and go on a first Sunday of the month if you want in for nothing. Adults pay €12 (about $14, £10), it closes on Mondays, and the nearest train station is 400 m from the door.
The address is the first joke of the visit. Rue du Labrador 26 is where Tintin himself lives in the early albums, and it is also, exactly, where the museum stands in Louvain-la-Neuve. Inside are eight galleries over three floors holding more than 80 original plates, 800 photographs and a large quantity of objects, drawings and personal effects belonging to Georges Remi, the Belgian who signed himself Hergé.
What we think of the Hergé Museum
The Hergé Museum is worth the trip out of Brussels, and it takes longer than you expect. I normally give a museum an hour, and if it runs shorter the museum was small or not for me. I spent close to two hours here going floor by floor, and the reason is that every room has more in it than it first shows.
Three things carry the visit: the Christian de Portzamparc building, which is a white prism on stilts at the edge of a wooded park with window frames that read as comic panels; the audio guide, which is genuinely good rather than dutiful; and the exhibition itself, which is about Hergé the working artist rather than about Tintin the character. The Hergé Museum comes highly recommended.
One thing has changed since that visit and it changes what you pack. The museum used to hand out a small screen-and-audio device at reception. It now runs the audio guide as a free smartphone app instead, so bring headphones and a charged phone.
What is the Hergé Museum?
The Hergé Museum is a museum devoted to Georges Remi, the creator of The Adventures of Tintin, and it opened in 2009. Hergé took his pen name from his own initials: Georges Remi reversed to R.G., which is pronounced “air-jay” in French. It is often searched for as the Tin Tin Museum, and it is the same place.
Christian de Portzamparc designed the building, and it is part of the exhibit rather than a container for it. The interior takes its cues from the ships and ports that fill Tintin’s travels, and the galleries are hung inside the volume rather than laid out as a corridor of rooms. Eight galleries over three floors hold more than 80 original plates, 800 photographs and a run of documents and objects that trace how Hergé actually worked.
The core of the collection is the Tintin material: original artwork, character studies and the scenes readers already carry in their heads, all drawn in the ligne claire, the clear-line style of even-weight outlines and flat colour that Hergé is credited with and that half of European comics still uses. The museum also gives space to his other series, including Quick and Flupke and Jo, Zette and Jocko, which is where you see how much of his output was not Tintin at all.
Where is the Hergé Museum?
The Hergé Museum is at Rue du Labrador 26, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, in the province of Walloon Brabant. Louvain-la-Neuve is a French-speaking university town built from nothing in the 1970s for UCLouvain, about 30 km (18.6 miles) south-east of Brussels, and its centre is a pedestrian deck with the traffic and the railway underneath it.
That layout matters for the walk from the station. Louvain-la-Neuve-Université station sits about 400 m from the museum, and you come up from the platforms onto the pedestrian level rather than out onto a road.
The eight rooms of the Hergé Museum
The 8 exhibition rooms of the Hergé Museum are listed below in the order you walk them, each built around one theme and illustrated with original drawings, magazines, personal items and the work itself.
- Room 1, the life of Hergé: his biography, from the Brussels childhood and the Boy Scout magazines to the wartime accusations and the last unfinished album.
- Room 2, Hergé’s art: advertising posters, engravings and other commercial and personal work outside comics.
- Room 3, Hergé’s characters: the Tintin cast, with quizzes on the audio guide, including one on telling Thomson and Thompson apart.
- Room 4, Hergé and the movies: a documentary on how closely he thought comics and film were related.
- Room 5, the laboratory: Professor Calculus’s inventions and the research behind Explorers on the Moon.
- Room 6, Tintin’s travels: the countries Tintin visits and the objects from them, plus Hergé’s later interest in the paranormal.
- Room 7, Studios Hergé: how he moved from working alone to running a studio, and what the studio actually did.
- Room 8, Hergé’s fame: the people he knew and the recognition he got, including Andy Warhol’s portrait of him.
Room 1: the life of Hergé
Room 1 is Hergé’s biography, told through personal objects and his earliest published work. Hergé was born Georges Remi in 1907 in Etterbeek, Brussels, drew from childhood and got his first regular outlet through the Boy Scouts, illustrating for scout magazines including Le Boy Scout. His first real series, Totor, C.P. des Hannetons, appeared there, and scouting shaped Tintin so completely that the character reads as an idealised scout.
He started signing his work “Hergé” in 1924. A year later he joined the newspaper Le XXe Siècle, and three years after that the paper asked him to produce a youth supplement, Le Petit Vingtième. Tintin the reporter and his dog Snowy first appeared in it in 1929, and Quick and Flupke, two Brussels street kids who later got their own cartoon, followed in 1930.
Until 1934 his foreign settings ran on stereotype. That year he met Zhang Chongren, a Chinese art student in Brussels, who helped him research The Blue Lotus and changed his method: from then on he researched every album.
The war is the part the room does not skirt. When the Germans invaded in 1940 and closed Le XXe Siècle, Hergé moved The Adventures of Tintin to Le Soir, which the occupier controlled. That, and some of the company he kept, made him a suspected collaborator. He was arrested several times after the liberation and barred from publishing Tintin in a Belgian newspaper until 1946. He was accused of fascism for the rest of his life and denied Nazi sympathies to the end of it.
Four dates close the story out. Casterman persuaded him in 1942 to colour his earlier work for publication as albums, Tintin magazine started in 1946, Studios Hergé opened in 1950, and he died in 1983 leaving Tintin and Alph-Art unfinished.
Room 2: Hergé’s art
Room 2 shows the work Hergé made outside comics, and there is more of it than most readers expect. Hergé drew advertising posters, produced engravings and made other artwork throughout his career, and samples of each hang here. He treated comics as the priority anyway, on the grounds that he had one hundred per cent to give and perfecting a comic took all of it.
Room 3: Hergé’s characters
Room 3 is about the cast, above all the Tintin regulars. The audio guide turns quizzes on here, including one that asks whether you can actually tell Thomson and Thompson apart, which is harder under pressure than it sounds.
Room 4: Hergé and the movies
Room 4 runs a documentary on the relationship between Hergé’s work and cinema. Hergé argued that a comic and a film are essentially the same thing and that the only difference is that the comic’s characters hold still, which is a useful way to look at the panels in the rooms either side.
Room 5: the laboratory
Room 5 covers Professor Calculus’s inventions and the research behind Explorers on the Moon, and it is the room that surprises adults. Hergé had a scale model of the rocket built so the drawings would hold up from every angle, which I had no idea about when I read the album as a child. Tintin walked on the moon in the 1954 album, 15 years before Neil Armstrong did it for real.
Room 6: Tintin’s travels
Room 6 maps where Tintin goes and displays objects from those places as they appear in the albums. It also handles Hergé’s later interest in the paranormal and in extraterrestrial life, and points out where that interest surfaces in the books.
Room 7: Studios Hergé
Room 7 explains how Hergé stopped working alone. Until he was about 40 he did everything himself; after that he built a team, partly because recolouring the back catalogue for album publication was more work than one person could do. He carried on drawing the characters and handed backgrounds and colour to collaborators, and everything the studio produced went out under his name apart from three Quick and Flupke albums credited to Studios Hergé.
Room 8: Hergé’s fame
Room 8 is about what the work did to his life. It gathers the people he knew and the recognition that came with the books, and the single object everyone stops at is Andy Warhol’s portrait of him.
The audio guide is now an app: download it first
The Hergé Museum audio guide is free, and since it moved onto your own phone you have to prepare for it. Download the “Musée Hergé” app from the App Store or Google Play before you travel, open it and download the content in your language, then scan the QR code at the reception desk to unlock it. Charge your phone and bring headphones.
It is worth the trouble. Each room gets around three separate explanations, and they are paced so that you finish listening before you have finished looking, which is the opposite of the usual problem with audio guides. The app carries photographs, extracts and interview clips alongside the audio, and several rooms add quizzes on Hergé and his work.
Hergé Museum opening hours, tickets and tours
The Hergé Museum opens every day except Mondays, and it also closes on 1 January and on 24, 25 and 31 December. Hours are 10.30am to 5.30pm Tuesday to Friday, with the ticket office closing at 5pm, and 10.30am to 6pm on Saturdays and Sundays, with the ticket office closing at 5.30pm.
Ticket prices are set out below.
| Visitor | Price |
|---|---|
| Adults | €12 (about $14, £10) |
| Seniors 65+, students, young people 15-18, large families | €7 |
| Children 7-14 | €5 |
| Students at UCLouvain and Saint-Louis University | €5 |
| Children under 7 | Free |
| Visitors with disabilities | Free |
| Museum Pass holders | Free |
| Everyone, on the first Sunday of the month | Free |
No reservation is needed for individual visitors. Guided tours run 1 hour 30 minutes and have to be booked two weeks ahead: the guide costs €150 for a group of up to 25 people, on top of each person’s admission. There is also a guided visit done blindfolded, for groups of up to 10, at €14 per person. Group rates apply from 15 people with four days’ notice.
The museum has a café-restaurant and a bookshop on site, and pets are not allowed except for service dogs.
How to get to the Hergé Museum
Take the train from Brussels to Louvain-la-Neuve-Université, which leaves you 400 m from the museum door on the town’s pedestrian level. Trains run frequently and the journey is under an hour from the Brussels stations, which makes this a half-day trip rather than a day out. Fares differ by service and time of day, so it is worth comparing trains to Louvain-la-Neuve if you are travelling at a weekend.
By car, take the E411 south from Brussels. The town centre is a pedestrian deck with the roads underneath, so set your satnav to Boulevard du Nord rather than to the museum’s street address, and use the paid Grand-Place car park, which is the closest. From there the museum is reached on foot along Rue Paulin Ladeuze. If you are combining Louvain-la-Neuve with the Ardennes or the Meuse valley, comparing rental car rates for a Brussels pick-up is worth the five minutes.
Tours and tickets around Brussels
Tintin is a Brussels story before it is a Louvain-la-Neuve one, and guided options in the city cover the comic-strip murals, the Belgian Comic Strip Center and the Art Nouveau streets Hergé grew up around. The widget below shows what is currently bookable.
Our Brussels guide covers the rest of the city if you are building a day around this trip.
Is the Hergé Museum worth visiting?
The Hergé Museum is worth visiting if you have read the albums, and it is still worth an hour if you have not. Readers get the originals, the working method and the rocket model; everyone else gets a well-made museum about a 20th-century graphic artist in a building by a Pritzker Prize winner. What it is not is a Tintin theme park: there are no rides and no walk-through Marlinspike Hall.
Is the Hergé Museum child-friendly?
The Hergé Museum works well with children, and families are a large part of who visits. Children are given activity sheets to work through, several rooms have interactive elements and quizzes on the audio guide, and the recreated vehicles and scenes from the albums, including the moon rocket, hold attention better than the drawings do. The building has ramps, lifts and wide routes between galleries, so pushchairs are not a problem.
Two practical points help. The app-based audio guide means each child old enough to use a phone needs their own device and headphones, or they share yours. And the museum is entirely indoors, which makes it one of the better wet-weather options within an hour of Brussels.
What are the rules inside the museum?
The 6 house rules of the Hergé Museum are listed below.
- No pets, apart from service dogs.
- No flash photography. Flash damages original artwork; photographs without it are fine.
- Do not touch the artwork. The plates on display are originals and cannot be replaced.
- No eating in the galleries. Use the café-restaurant instead.
- Accessibility is built in. Ramps, lifts and wide gallery routes run throughout, and visitors with disabilities enter free.
- Keep the noise down. The audio guide is the main way people experience the rooms.
WonderfulWanderings Pro Tips
The 5 tips below come from a visit to the museum and from re-checking its 2026 arrangements, and each one changes how the visit goes.
- Download the “Musée Hergé” app before you travel, and pack headphones. The audio guide is no longer a device handed out at reception. It is a free app you install yourself and unlock by scanning a QR code at the desk, so a flat phone or forgotten earphones costs you most of what the exhibition has to say.
- Budget two hours, not one. Each of the eight rooms carries around three separate audio explanations, and they run out before the room does. I went in expecting an hour and stayed nearly two.
- Go on the first Sunday of the month if the date suits. Entry is free for everyone on that day. A Museum Pass also gets you in free on any open day, and visitors with disabilities enter free.
- Watch the ticket desk, not the closing time. The museum shuts at 5.30pm on weekdays but stops selling tickets at 5pm, and at 6pm at weekends with the desk closing at 5.30pm. Arriving at ten past five on a Tuesday means no visit at all.
- Set the satnav to Boulevard du Nord, not to Rue du Labrador. Louvain-la-Neuve’s centre is a pedestrian deck built over the roads, so the museum’s own address will not get a car to a parking space. The paid Grand-Place car park is the closest, and the museum is a short walk from it along Rue Paulin Ladeuze.
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, and the first-person notes in this post come from her own visit to the Hergé Museum in Louvain-la-Neuve. The team covers Belgium for independent travellers, including the museums, tours, trains and day trips from Brussels worth planning around, and re-checks the opening hours, prices and visiting arrangements on this page before each update.
Sophie, This is definitely one of my absolute favorite things I’ve done in Belgium. I highly recommend it to everyone!
Oh nice! I’m wondering of many visitors know about it, as it’s still located outside of Brussels.
This is top of my list next visit to Belgium – even before beer! I was raised on Tintin in both English and French and passed on the addiction to my daughter. We went to the comic museum in Brussels many years back but this has been on the radar since it opened. I always wanted to be a roving reporter because of Tintin; I guess a travel blogger is pretty close though :-)
I think you can call yourself the Tintin of the digital age or something Andy :D Let me know when you come!
Sofie, I really enjoyed this post! Nice to know more about Herge & Tinitin after enjoying with them in my childhood – in the world of Rastapopoulos, Capt.Haddock, Calculus and of course Milou!
I always wondered why…when he goes to Nepal(in ‘Tintin in Tibet’), the local language spoken by the porters is written in Hindi, and not Nepali.
And another big pastime was Asterix, from across the border!
I’m afraid I can’t answer that question :)
Nice article but Tintin’s dog is called Snowy not Bobby.
My bad! I’ll correct that now. All those names in all those languages:)
Amazing article. His work is a big part of my childhood. I wish there was a virtual walkthrough. I created one once I visited national gallery of Australia one afternoon.
Thanks for the comment, but I took out your link. No need to advertise your company here.
doesnt matter. As long as you see it.
This museum looks fantastic, very interesting and I feel so stupid for not knowing about it whilst we were in Brussels, we could have made it there somehow :(
Next time I guess!
Definitely next time!:)
I’ve always wanted to visit this museum. Sounds like it’s worth a trip! Thanks for sharing about your experience there.
Definitely worth the trip:)
I am going to Belgium in a few weeks and the Hergé Museum is my main agenda there. I’m so excited and even more excited after reading this post. Oh I cannot wait!
Oh wonderful!
I can be as good as that you’ll enjoy it. It’s a great museum :)
Have fun!
It was a fantastic museum I have ever visited which has made a nostalgia. But I can not imagine how much cruel you are when the photography is forbidden inside! This is the age of Instagram so you should leave the lovers feel free to take some selfies and stuffs there. Please revise your policies!
Hey Shahram, I only wrote about the museum. I don’t run it :)
Now i am on the way to Museum witn my son and daughter and intold them this my fabouriye Book i read when my childhood …
i can”t image how fantastic Museum