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Belgium's great port and diamond city on the Scheldt — Rubens' hometown, wrapped around a soaring Gothic spire.
Antwerp rose on a bend of the river Scheldt and by the 1500s was the busiest port in the world, the money-and-trade capital of northern Europe. That golden age crashed when Spain retook the city in 1585 and Dutch rivals shut the river, but its art kept blazing — the painter Peter Paul Rubens ran a famous studio here. Rebuilt again by the diamond trade and a reopened port, the city of about 545,000 (2024) still spreads beneath its 123-metre cathedral spire, half old-master gravity, half restless modern style.
For a few dazzling decades Antwerp was the center of the world. After the harbor of nearby Bruges silted up, ships crowded here instead, and by the mid-1500s the Scheldt quays handled the spices, silver and cloth of a newly global economy. Traders from every nation met at a purpose-built exchange, and the city minted more wealth than anywhere north of the Alps. Then came the wars of religion: in 1585 Spanish troops recaptured Antwerp, the victorious Dutch republic blockaded the river mouth, and the port fell silent almost overnight. Thousands of merchants and craftsmen fled north to Amsterdam, carrying Antwerp's fortune with them.
What stayed was genius. Peter Paul Rubens, born in 1577, returned from Italy to run the busiest painting workshop in Europe, turning out huge, muscular altarpieces with a team of assistants — among them the young Anthony van Dyck. Two of Rubens' greatest works still hang where he meant them to, inside the Cathedral of Our Lady, whose single lacework spire took nearly 170 years to build and remains the tallest church tower in the Low Countries. Around it, the printer Christophe Plantin ran one of the first industrial-scale publishing houses, and the guild houses on the Grote Markt still show off the swagger of merchants who had money to burn.
The river gave Antwerp a second life. When the Scheldt reopened in the 1800s the docks roared back, and a new trade settled in beside them: diamonds. The compact quarter behind the cathedral-like Central Station still cuts and trades a huge share of the world's rough stones, much of it in Yiddish and Hebrew, Hindi and Armenian. Today the same streets carry avant-garde fashion, bruising nightlife and quiet Rubens rooms — a port city that has never stopped reinventing itself.
The making of Antwerp
Cathedral of Our Lady
The tallest church tower in the Low Countries — a single 123-metre Gothic spire that took almost 170 years to finish.
Peter Paul Rubens
Antwerp's own master (1577–1640), who ran Europe's busiest painting workshop and trained the young Van Dyck.
The Descent from the Cross
Rubens' towering triptych, painted 1611–14 and still hanging in the cathedral it was made for.
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Grote Markt
The old market square, ringed by gilded guild houses and a Renaissance town hall, with the Brabo fountain at its heart.
Antwerpen-Centraal
A 1905 railway station so lavish it is nicknamed the "railway cathedral" — stone, marble and a vast glass vault.
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The Diamond District
A few dense blocks behind Central Station where much of the world's rough diamonds are still cut and traded.
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