Guided tour of Bruges Day Trip with transport from Paris

Overview

A fourteen-hour day to Bruges with a licensed guide, coach transport from Paris, a canal cruise in the summer months and free time in the UNESCO-listed centre.

What to expect

• Collection in Paris where your option includes it, then the coach north.
• Arrival in Bruges and the guided walk through the historic centre.
• The canal cruise, between April and October.
• Free time for lunch, a museum, a tasting or the shops.
• Departure from Bruges around half past four, back in Paris near nine.

The tower over the market is a political statement

Every visitor photographs the belfry. Almost nobody is told what it was for.

In medieval Flanders the two tall buildings in any town were the church and the lord's castle, and both belonged to somebody else. The belfry was the third kind of tower: built by the townspeople, paid for by the town, and answerable to the town. Putting one up was a claim that the burghers governed themselves.

That is why the belfries of this region are collectively protected today. They are not cathedral spires. They are the architecture of civic independence.

The city's rights were kept at the top of it

The claim was not symbolic. High in the tower is a strongroom where Bruges kept its charters — the documents in which counts and dukes had granted the town its privileges — along with the municipal seal and the treasury, behind an iron grille secured by several locks whose keys were held by different men.

If the charters burned, the rights were arguable. So they were stored above the market, in the most defensible room in the city, under the bells.

The bells ran the day

The tower was also the clock, the alarm and the public address system of a city that had neither. Different bells meant different things: the gates opening, the working day starting and ending, a fire, a call to assemble. Everyone within earshot organised their day around them.

Fire took the wooden spire more than once, and after the last one in the eighteenth century nobody rebuilt it — which is why a tower that clearly wants a point ends flat.

What the guide adds, and what is on you

The guided walk covers the centre. The climb to the top of the tower — a few hundred steps, no lift — is not part of it, and is yours to arrange in the free time if you want it.

Practicalities

The canal cruise is included between April and October. Outside those months it does not run, and the day is a walking one.

Lunch is not included; the free time is when you eat. Belgian specialities and tastings are your own arrangement.

Fourteen hours, with around seven of them on the road, for a return that reaches Paris at about nine in the evening.