Local guide
Things to do in Ghent: what locals actually recommend
The places people who live in Ghent send their friends to: the castle, the canals, the hidden gardens and the bars tourists walk straight past.
Ghent is small enough to cross on foot in half an hour and dense enough to keep you busy for a week. That combination trips people up: they tick off the cathedral and the castle, take a photo on Graslei and leave thinking they have seen the city.
This guide is the version we give friends who come to visit. It mixes the landmarks you genuinely should not skip with the courtyards, alleys and bars that make people move here.
1. Stand on the water between Graslei and Korenlei
The row of guild houses on Graslei is the postcard of Ghent, and it earns it. Go early in the morning or after dinner, when the day-trip crowds are gone and the facades catch the light. Sit on the stones with your legs over the water like everyone else does.
Cross the Sint-Michielsbrug for the view that shows all three towers lined up. It is the only spot in the city where the whole medieval skyline stacks into one frame.
2. Go inside the Gravensteen, then look up
A moated stone castle in the middle of a shopping street is not a normal thing to have. Walk the ramparts, look down into the courtyard and imagine the counts of Flanders using the place mostly to intimidate their own citizens, which is more or less what happened.
3. See the Van Eyck panels in Sint-Baafs
The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb is the most stolen artwork in history and still, after restoration, one of the strangest and most detailed paintings you will ever stand in front of. Book a slot rather than queueing.
4. Disappear into a begijnhof
Two minutes off a busy street, the Klein Begijnhof is a walled village of whitewashed houses and gardens where the noise simply stops. It is UNESCO listed, free, and most visitors never find it.
5. Paint something in the graffiti alley
Werregarenstraat is legal to spray, for anyone, at any time. The walls change weekly. Bring a can or just watch someone work; it is the least museum-like art experience in the city.
6. Climb something for the view
The Belfort lift gets the tourists. The top floor of De Krook library gets almost nobody, is free, and gives you rooftops and water in one sweep.
7. Walk the old harbour that came back to life
North of the centre, the docks turned from industry into a neighbourhood: Dok Noord, the Nieuwe Dokken, water where cranes used to be. This is the Ghent locals are proudest of and guidebooks barely mention.
8. Sit on the Vrijdagmarkt with something Belgian
Squares are where Ghent happens. The Vrijdagmarkt has held markets since the thirteenth century and terraces on every side. Order a Gentse Strop and stay longer than you planned.
9. Find the street art you were not looking for
Roa's giant animals, Strook's wooden portraits, Kitsune's chrysalis. Ghent treats its walls as a gallery, and half the fun is turning a corner into a piece nobody told you about.
10. End in a park, not a queue
The Citadelpark, the abbey garden at Sint-Pieters, the grass at Zuidpark on a warm evening. Ghent is a city that expects you to sit down at some point.
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