Brussels

• 1. Introduction

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  Brussels carries two identities at once, and both are real. It is the capital of Belgium, seat of a monarchy that dates to 1831, and at the same time the de facto capital of the European Union, hosting the administrative, executive, and legislative branches of a body that spans a continent. A city whose name has become a shorthand for Europe itself.

  It sits in the geographic heart of Belgium, an enclave inside the Flemish region, less than 4 km north of Wallonia. Its population of over 1.2 million speaks, collectively, 104 languages. Its streets layer Gothic guild halls against Art Nouveau town houses against postmodern glass towers built for institutions that did not exist a century ago.

  How did a hamlet on a marshy river island become one of the most consequential addresses on earth? Why does a city of 162 square kilometres have more ambassadors and journalists than Washington D.C.? And what does it mean to live inside a place that the world uses as a synonym for bureaucracy, while your neighbours make pralines, lambic beer, and comic strips? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. From Senne to City

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  Saint Vindicianus, Bishop of Cambrai, made the first recorded mention of the place called Brosella in 695, when it was still a hamlet. The name derives from the Old Dutch Bruocsella, combining words meaning marsh and dwelling. That marshy origin shaped everything.

  The settlement stood on an island in the river Senne, and according to local tradition, Saint Gaugericus had built a chapel there around 580. The official founding moment came around 979, when Charles, Duke of Lower Lorraine, transferred the relics of the martyr Saint Gudula from Moorsel to that same chapel. Two years earlier, Otto II, Holy Roman Emperor, had appointed Charles as Duke of Lower Lotharingia, and Charles responded by ordering the construction of the city's first permanent fortification on the island.

  Lambert I, Count of Louvain, inherited the County of Brussels around 1000 by marrying Charles' daughter. The town's position on a trade route linking the Flemish cities of Bruges and Ghent with Cologne in Germany made it a commercial centre for the textile trade. As the population grew to around 30,000, the surrounding marshes were drained. Work began on what is now the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula in 1225, replacing an older Romanesque church. A second set of city walls was erected between 1356 and 1383; their former course is still traced today by the Small Ring, a series of boulevards that bound the historical centre.

  The river Senne, which gave the city its start, eventually became a serious health hazard. From 1867 to 1871, under mayor Jules Anspach, its entire course through the urban area was covered over. That operation cleared the way for broad, Haussmann-esque boulevards, and buildings like the Bourse Palace (1873) and the Palace of Justice (1883) rose in its wake.

• 3. Burgundy, Habsburgs, and Catastrophe

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  Mary of Burgundy was born in Brussels, a fact that would change the political map of Europe. When her father, Charles the Bold, died in the Battle of Nancy in 1477, Mary's marriage to Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I brought the Low Countries under Habsburg sovereignty. Brabant, and with it Brussels, entered a composite empire of staggering reach.

  Mary's son Philip the Handsome became Duke of Burgundy and Brabant, then died in 1506, leaving his son Charles V to accumulate titles that no single ruler had held before: King of Spain (crowned in the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula), then Holy Roman Emperor at the death of Maximilian I in 1519. It was at the Coudenberg Palace that Charles was declared of age in 1515, and it was there in 1555 that he abdicated all his possessions, passing the Habsburg Netherlands to King Philip II of Spain. That palace, famous across Europe, was later destroyed by fire in 1731.

  The city flourished as the Princely Capital of the Burgundian Netherlands. Brussels lace and Brussels tapestry were luxury goods found in castles across Europe. Then came 1695. During the Nine Years' War, King Louis XIV of France sent troops to bombard Brussels with artillery. The resulting fire destroyed the Grand-Place along with 4,000 buildings, a third of all the buildings in the city. It was the most destructive event in Brussels' entire history. The subsequent reconstruction profoundly changed the city's appearance; the guild halls that stand on the Grand-Place today date from those rebuilding years.

• 4. Revolution and Reinvention

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  On a summer night in 1830, a performance of Auber's opera La Muette de Portici at the Royal Theatre of La Monnaie sparked the Belgian Revolution. The audience spilled into the streets, and within weeks Belgium was breaking from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. Brussels became the capital and seat of government of the new nation.

  On the 21st of July 1831, Leopold I ascended the throne as the first King of the Belgians, and immediately ordered the demolition of the city walls and the construction of public buildings. The Société Générale de Belgique launched dozens of companies, transforming Brussels into a financial centre. The Brussels-Charleroi Canal opened in 1832, bringing manufacturing and commerce. The Free University of Brussels was established in 1834, Saint-Louis University in 1858, and in 1835 the first passenger railway built outside England linked Molenbeek-Saint-Jean with Mechelen.

  The city's population grew from around 80,000 to more than 625,000 over the course of the 19th century. The International Exposition of 1897 brought infrastructure investment including an 11 km grand alley connecting the Royal Museum for Central Africa in the suburb of Tervuren to the capital. Brussels became one of the major European centres of Art Nouveau in the 1890s and early 1900s. Victor Horta, Paul Hankar, and Henry van de Velde produced designs that survive in the city today; Horta's Major Town Houses, including the Hôtel Tassel (1893) and the Horta Museum (1901), have been listed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites since 2000.

• 5. A City Built for the World

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  The Treaty of Brussels, signed on the 17th of March 1948 between Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, was a prelude to NATO. The organisation's political and administrative headquarters eventually settled on the Boulevard Léopold III in Haren, in the north-eastern part of the city. A new headquarters building begun in 2010 was completed in 2017 at a cost of 750 million euros. NATO now brings together over 4,500 staff from allied nations at that location.

  Brussels began hosting European institutions in 1957. The Commission and Council based their activities in the European Quarter, in the east of the city. Between 2002 and 2004, the European Council also fixed its seat there. The Commission alone now occupies 865,000 square metres within the European Quarter, a quarter of all office space in Brussels. The Treaty of Amsterdam formally gave Brussels the seat of the European Commission and the Council of the European Union; three quarters of Parliament sessions take place at its Brussels hemicycle, though formal votes on proposals take place in Strasbourg.

  The concentration of international bodies transformed the city's character. Brussels hosts 120 international institutions, 181 embassies within the city, and more than 2,500 diplomats, making it the second centre of diplomatic relations in the world after New York City. There are more ambassadors and journalists in Brussels than in Washington D.C. In 2009, an estimated 286 lobbying consultancies were known to work there. The international community in Brussels numbers at least 70,000 people, served by dedicated international schools.

  This density of organisations also brought a deadly cost. On the 22nd of March 2016, three coordinated nail bombings detonated by ISIL struck Brussels: two at Brussels Airport in Zaventem and one at Maalbeek metro station. Thirty-two victims and three suicide bombers were killed; 330 people were injured. It was the deadliest act of terrorism in Belgian history.

• 6. Language and Identity

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  Brussels was historically Dutch-speaking, using the Brabantian dialect. The language shift toward French accelerated sharply after Belgian independence in 1830. French was the exclusive language of the judiciary, the administration, the army, education, and cultural life, making it essential for social mobility. After 1880, and more so after the turn of the 20th century, French proficiency among Dutch-speakers in Brussels grew rapidly.

  From 1910 onwards, monolingual French-speakers increased in number. By the mid-20th century they outnumbered the mostly bilingual Flemish inhabitants. Since its creation on the 18th of June 1989, the Brussels-Capital Region has been legally bilingual in French and Dutch. In 2013, French was spoken well to perfectly by 88% of the population, while Dutch reached only 23%, down from 33% in 2000. English was known by 30%, Arabic by 18%, and Spanish by 9%.

  Between 2023 and 2024, surveys found that 29% of the population speaks only languages other than French and Dutch at home, and residents collectively use 104 languages, up from 72 in 2001. The original Brusselian dialect, a form of Brabantic with French loanwords, still survives among a small minority called Brusseleers. At the last Belgian census in 1991, more than a third of residents had not been born in Belgium. By 2020, according to Statbel, 74.3% of the population of the Brussels-Capital Region was of foreign origin.

  The expanding use of French into surrounding Dutch-speaking municipalities in the Brussels periphery has been dubbed the "oil slick" by its opponents, and remains one of the most contested issues in Belgian politics. The Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde arrondissement, which combined the bilingual Brussels region with a monolingual Flemish electoral and judicial district, was divided in mid-2012 after decades of political conflict.

• 7. Culture, Folklore, and Chocolate

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  Pralines were first introduced in 1912 by Jean Neuhaus II, a Belgian chocolatier of Swiss origin, in the Royal Saint-Hubert Galleries. The galleries, one of the oldest covered shopping arcades in Europe, were built in 1847 and still draw around six million visitors a year. The technique for growing blanched endives was accidentally discovered in the 1850s at the Botanical Garden of Brussels in Saint-Josse-ten-Noode, giving the world the Belgian endive.

  Brussels' identity as a capital of the comic strip is equally specific. Characters including Tintin, Lucky Luke, The Smurfs, Spirou, and Gaston were created there. Walls throughout the city are painted with large murals of comic book characters, collectively known as the Brussels Comic Book Route. The Belgian Comic Strip Center, housed in the former Magasins Waucquez textile department store designed by Victor Horta in the Art Nouveau style, combines both artistic traditions of the city.

  The Ommegang, a folkloric costumed procession commemorating the Joyous Entry of Emperor Charles V and his son Philip II in the city in 1549, takes place every July. Since 2019 it has been recognised as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO. The Meyboom, an older tradition dating to 1308, celebrates the planting of a young beech on the 9th of August. The name is a corruption of the Dutch word meaning tree of joy, and the celebration is tied to a long-standing folkloric feud with Leuven stretching back to the Middle Ages.

  The Atomium, a 103 m modernist structure on the Heysel Plateau, was built for the 1958 World's Fair. It consists of nine steel spheres connected by tubes, forming a model of an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times. The architect André Waterkeyn devoted it to science. It stands today as one of the city's most recognisable landmarks, next to a miniature park featuring 1:25 scale models of famous European buildings.