Home > Destinations > Brussels > Brussels for Children

Brussels for Children

Brussels has a great reputation as a place for adults to play. The pralines and chocolates, the jazz venues and nightclubs, the beer and moules et frites, all make for a good grown-up weekend away, but there is plenty in this city for children too. After all Brussels is the home of the cartoon strip and whimsical artists like René Magritte. It’s also long been at the forefront of European puppetry. Both Bande dessinée and puppetry are art forms with a huge adult following these days but they attest to the inherent playfulness of the Belgian psyche, something that makes the city of Brussels a very child-friendly place to visit.

The Belgian Centre for Comic Strip Art (Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée) is a must for any children (and their parents) who have enjoyed Tintin or the Smurfs. These Belgian icons are just a few of the cartoon characters whose fictional lives are celebrated here in the Lower Town, inside a former department store designed by the great Art Nouveau architect, Victor Horta. As well as a lot of interactive opportunities to discover how comic strips are actually put together, the centre has its own excellent shop and restaurant. There are also life-size models of Tintin, Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus in their lunar exploration suits that bring out everyone’s cameras. Who can resist being photographed alongside the first men on the moon?

Beyond the Comic Strip Centre itself, Brussels has been colonised by Bande dessinée. There are numerous first-class shops devoted to the art form and to its merchandise that will delight children. Shop windows along Boulevard Anspach are dotted with models of bright blue Smurfs, the urbane cult Chat, Broussaille and a multitude of characters from the world of both Asterix and Tintin. But you’ll also find the facades of whole buildings taken over by cartoon characters as part of the city’s Comic Strip Route. In 1991 Brussels came up with the idea of simultaneously commemorating its most popular fictional characters and dealing with the gable ends of some rather unappetising terraces. Now almost 40 walls have been covered in massive tributes to 35 or so Belgian comic strip artists, with new walls being added at a rate of two or three a year. A guide book is available so families can trek from one huge cartoon to the next. Some of the images are particularly witty, with several working the location of the wall into a moment in a cartoon narrative. For example, in Rue du Marché au Charbon behind the Grand’ Place you can see a mural in which young Broussaille crosses the same road as you and in another the heroic Victor Sackville is pictured walking stealthily down the road in a scene from L’Opéra de la Mort. Near la Gare du Midi and its Eurostar Terminal you can catch Captain Haddock and Tintin coming down the side of a real building on a two dimensional fire escape and in Boulevard du Midi Philippe Geluck’s Chat looms up,inscrutably building himself out of bricks.

Taking the train out to Louvain-la-Neuve, 30kms south of Brussels, will bring you to another prime comic strip location, the Museé Hergé, which opened in 2009. This colourful, unusual structure, hidden in a wood on the edge of the modern town of Louvain, was designed by Pritzker-prize winning Christian de Portzamparc who wanted to create the impression of a museum that had been drawn rather than built. Inside is everything any Tintin fan could want to know about Hergé and his boy-reporter hero.

Back in Brussels itself there is a wide range of more traditional museums that always delights younger visitors. The Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences is a modern building offering a whole gallery devoted to mammals adapted to living at the Earth’s two poles. It also contains the world's largest museum hall completely dedicated to dinosaur skeletons,including 30 fossilized Iguanodons, which were discovered in 1878 in Wallonia, in the South of Belgium.

The Brussels City Museum located on the Grand Place in what is known as The King’s House also attracts its share of young visitors but for a very different reason. Here are stored and displayed the hundreds of costumes belonging to – and donated to – the Manneken Pis, the tiny statue of a urinating boy that has inexplicably become the symbol of Brussels. Most countries have offered the naked boy their national dress, but there is also a Manneken Samurai costume, a Dracula costume, a Manneken frogman, ice-hockey player and Father Christmas. The King’s House itself is a beautiful Gothic structure dating from 1536 but no king ever lived in it. Built as a "Broodhuis" (bread house) from which bakers sold their loaves, it was taken over as an administrative centre by the dukes of Brabant, then Masters of Bruxelles, hence its French name "Maison du Roi".

Another stunning – but very different – building is the MIM, the Musical Instruments Museum on the slopes of Montagne de la Cour leading up to the Royal Quarter. Here a huge collection of instruments is housed in one of the most imaginative Art Nouveau buildings in Brussels. The Old England is a glass and metal department store designed in 1899 by the architect Paul Saintenoy. Over 1,500 musical instruments are on display here out of a total of 7,000 owned by the Brussels Conservatoire. Tibetan temple bells, ancient Greek lyres and a spinet-harpsicord (one of only two left in the world) can be listened to on headphones. However most visitors head straight for the section devoted to instruments patented by the nineteenth-century Belgian inventor from Dinant Adolphe Sax who not only gave us the saxophone but other less successful (and more curious) instruments.

Belgium’s long attachment to puppetry is celebrated at the Théâtre de Marionettes de Toone, which is located down a dark narrowpassageway off La petite rue des Bouchers. During the Hapsburg Spanish occupation ofBrusselsall the city’s theatres were closed for fear that actors would whip up dissent among the population. As a result it was left to puppets to voice public anger and thus it became a subversive art form. The famous Toones are a family guild of puppeteers dating back to 1830. Each Toone adopts his successor who then takes on the name Toone. The honour doesn’t necessarily pass from father to son. The current chief puppeteer,Toone VIII (also known as Nicolas Géal) took over in 2003. The theatre’s repertoire encompasses no less than 1,000 puppet plays including “Hamlet”, “La Guerre de Charlemagne" (the War of Charlemagne) and "La Bataille de Waterloo" (the Battle of Waterloo). Performances are well worth catching and will inspire young minds with how much puppetry can achieve. There is also a puppet museum (free during the intermission) and a marionette workshop.

An altogether gentler experience is to be found in Rue du Bourgmestre where Brussels has opened a Children’s Museum, one of the 185 official “Hands On” exhibition spaces in the world that are designed to give children the opportunity know themselves - and others - better. While that may sound too serious to be fun, the clever use of visual displays and elaborate sets allow children to role-play such activities as driving a tram, sitting in a space capsule, fighting a fire, producing a television program and planting a Japanese garden.

Scientastic, accessed below ground via the Bourse metro station, is a similar project that educates through entertainment. Experiences like changing your voice to that of a space alien,using a mirror to lift both legs off the ground simultaneously, flying like a bird, dancing with your own shadow or whispering secrets from one parabola to another reinforce the notion of science as fun.

Brussels also has its own Aquarium, located near the Koekelberg Basilica. The centre contains 47 aquariums and terrariums and houses a number of species that no longer exist in the wild. More for the enthusiast than the casual visitor, the aquarium is popular with school parties.

Finally there is the Maison du Jouet, a toy museum in an old mansion on Rue de l’Association which fills twenty rooms with early twentieth-century mechanical toys, teddy bears, china dolls and even an old tin-plate train set. The very oldest toys date back to 1830 and soare as old as Belgium itself! The museum bravely refuses to classify its exhibits or to police its young visitors, so there is a lot of tearing up and down the stairs while parents indulge in nostalgia for their own toy cupboards.

On the north-west edge of the city stands a curious symbol that draws family groups to an area called the Heysel plateau. Best-known as the venue for football’s Heysel Stadium, this area is most familiar because of its very space-age-looking Atomium. The molecular Atomium was built in 1958 as the centrepiece for the International Exhibition held that year. Taking its shape from an iron molecule magnified 165 billion times, the structure consists of nine 18-metre diameter spheres linked together and rising to a height of 102 metres. Internally a snack bar, restaurant and various exhibition spaces are linked by a series of escalators and stairs. The structure,which was only ever intended to be temporary, proved hugely popular likeParis' EiffelTower and thus remained in situ. It has recently being refurbished and now glitters over the various other Heysel attractions.

Best known of these is Mini-Europe, a superb recreation of signature buildings from all over Europe to a consistent scale of 1:25. Over 80 cities and 350 buildings are represented. Many countries contributed to their own exhibits, with the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela requiring more than 24,000 hours of work and the Brussels Grand-Place costing €350,000 to construct. The United Kingdom is represented by the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben (which stand very close to the Paris Eiffel Tower) as well as Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford, Longleat in Wiltshire, the Royal Crescent and Circus in Bath, Dover Castle and Arlington Row in the Cotswolds.

To ensure that the park is more than a series of 1:25 scale inanimate objects there are moving trains, cable cars and gondolas as well as an erupting Vesuvius (very effective during evening visits) an animated fall of the Berlin Wall and a corrida in Seville. In July and August there are also musical fireworks on Saturday evenings in Mini-Europe.

The Heysel also contains a Planetarium,which was begun for the Great Universal Exhibition of 1935 and Océade, a heated subtropical water-park with 11 slides. The Cycloon at 140 metres is the longest slide in Belgium. The Bounty Raft is the first slide in Belgium with a duo tube and the Hurricane, the country’s fastest slide travelling 80 metres in 7 seconds with a drop of 18 meters.

Brussels’ other major exhibition space outside the old city is located to the east. Herein 1880 King Leopold II turned an old military exercise ground into a park known today as Le Cinquantenaire. Today there are a number of museums to be enjoyed, including the Royal Museum of the Army and of Military History, which has the great advantage of being free. Altogether ten centuries of military hardware can be visited by young enthusiasts. Exhibits include Napoleonic uniforms, medieval armour, firearms, tanks, planes and a whole gallery devoted to the Great War which so affected Belgium. The southern half of the park is currently occupied by the Cinquantenaire Art Museum and the AutoWorld Museum.

For families that don’t want to spend all their time in museums, it's a lot of fun simply cycling around Brussels. The Pro Vélo system,which operates across a number of European cities, is based near Gare Centrale. Bicycles can be taken from one point in the city and deposited at any other docking station without having to be returned. With the exception of the steep climb from the LowerTown to Royal Quarter,Brussels is an easy city to cycle. Pro Vélo also offer 11 guided cycle tours on themes such as “Brussels for Beginners”, “Magritte and Surrealists” and “Comic strips and cafés”. Another popular child-friendly way to see the city is Brussels Rollers which departs on roller skates from place Poelart every Friday night during summer months (June-September) starting at 8pm. Anyone who wants to join in only has to turn up with their inline skates, helmets, pads and reflective strips. A different route is taken through the city every week depending on the weather.

Brussels