Brussels: Mannekin-Pis

The Manneken-Pis is 61 centimetres tall. That’s the size of a toddler, cast in bronze, urinating into a fountain at the corner of Rue de l’Etuve and Rue du Chene, two minutes’ walk from the Grand Place. You will have seen photographs. The photographs do not adequately prepare you for the experience of arriving at what is supposedly one of the world’s most famous monuments and discovering it is smaller than most houseplants. The crowd around it is always large. The monument itself is minuscule. Brussels has been making this joke on tourists since the 1600s and shows no sign of stopping.

The statue dates to 1619, designed by Hieronimus Duquesnoy the Elder. Why a urinating boy became the civic symbol of Brussels is not definitively established. The most plausible theory involves the medieval practice of statues marking water fountains, and the iconography of putti (cherub figures) common in Baroque public art, but nobody is certain. What is certain is that since 1698, the city has been donating costumes to dress the statue, and it now has over 1,000 outfits stored in the nearby GardeRobe museum – the statue is dressed in appropriate costume for events, national days, and occasions of various kinds. On themed days, crowds arrive specifically to photograph it in uniform.

Grand Place

The Manneken-Pis is two minutes’ walk from the Grand Place, which is the actual reason to be in this part of Brussels. The Grand Place is a UNESCO World Heritage Site: a 120-by-68-metre square surrounded by guild houses and the Gothic Hotel de Ville (City Hall), dating primarily from the late 17th century after the French bombardment of 1695 destroyed the originals. The reconstruction produced some of the finest Baroque and Gothic guild architecture in northern Europe – each house representing a different trade guild, each competing in elaborateness. The gilded facades at night under specific lighting are extraordinary. Go at 10pm on a clear summer evening and stand in the middle of the square looking at the Hotel de Ville.

The flower market on the square happens daily; the chocolate shops around the perimeter are among the better places to purchase Belgian chocolate (the chain shops on the tourist streets are not).

What Else Brussels Has

Magritte Museum near the Royale Museums of Fine Arts: the world’s largest collection of work by Rene Magritte (1898-1967), one of the 20th century’s most distinctive painters. The domestic objects rendered strange, the bowler hats, the pipes that are not pipes – the biography and the work in context is worth more than the reproduction posters that have been selling in design shops for 50 years.

Delirium Cafe holds the Guinness World Record for the bar with the most different beers – over 3,000 bottles, plus taps. Belgian beer is as serious a subject as French wine, and Delirium is the logical place to test the proposition. The Trappist beers (Westvleteren, Rochefort, Chimay, among others) brewed in Belgian monasteries are different in character from the mass-produced versions sold internationally.

Comme Chez Soi is Brussels’ most celebrated restaurant, two Michelin stars, serving what its menu describes as classic French cuisine but which actually reflects the Belgian bourgeois cooking tradition that is somewhat different from either French haute cuisine or brasserie cooking. Reserve well ahead.

Getting There

Brussels is at the centre of Europe’s high-speed rail network. Eurostar from London St Pancras takes 2 hours. Paris Nord to Brussels-Midi is 1 hour 20 minutes. Amsterdam to Brussels is 1 hour 50 minutes. The train is substantially better than flying for any of these routes.