Ostend

• 1. Introduction

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  Ostend sits at the western edge of Belgium, where the North Sea has spent centuries trying to reclaim it. The city's very name comes from "oost-einde" - the east end of an island called Testerep, a strip of land caught between open water and a beach lake. That precarious geography shaped everything: who attacked it, who defended it, who built monuments there, and who bombed it nearly into oblivion.

  By the time World War II ended, Ostend held a distinction that no city in Belgium would want. More than four hundred Allied bombs had fallen on its streets. Historic hotels, a grand casino, a city hall, and the archives of centuries had been reduced to rubble. The question this documentary will answer is how a small fishing village on an unstable coastline became a city so strategically valuable that empires fought over it for a thousand years - and what survives of it today.

• 2. The Island That Became a City

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  Around 1265, the inhabitants of what was then a small fishing settlement were granted the right to hold a market and to build a market hall. That single grant changed everything. A village of North Sea fishermen became, in legal terms, a town.

  The North Sea coastline had always been dangerous. The water was powerful and the shoreline restless. By 1395, the risk had grown severe enough that the inhabitants decided to act - building a new Ostend behind large dikes, set further from the sea that threatened to consume them. Fishing remained the main source of income, and the sea was both the lifeblood and the constant adversary of the community.

  That act of relocating behind the dikes was not the last time Ostend would have to rebuild itself from disaster. It was, in many ways, the first rehearsal.

• 3. The Bloodiest Siege in a Century of War

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  Between 1601 and 1604, Ostend became the site of what observers at the time described with a phrase that still carries weight: "the Spanish assailed the unassailable and the Dutch defended the indefensible." The Siege of Ostend cost a combined total of more than 80,000 dead or wounded. It was the single bloodiest battle of the Eighty Years' War.

  The Dutch rebels known as the Gueuzen had taken control of the town before the siege began. The Spanish were determined to retake it. What followed was years of grinding attrition on both sides, at an extraordinary human cost. The shock of those losses set negotiations in motion, eventually leading to a truce. When that truce eventually broke down, the town shifted roles again, becoming a base for Dunkirker forces.

  The strategic position on the North Sea coast that made Ostend worth fighting over so fiercely would attract armies again and again over the following centuries.

• 4. Empires, Trade, and the Ostend Company

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  In 1722, the Dutch closed off the Westerschelde, the entrance to the port of Antwerp - then considered the world's biggest harbour. With Antwerp cut off, Ostend suddenly became the most important alternative exit to the sea for the region. The town's fortunes rose accordingly.

  Belgium Austriacum had by then become part of the Austrian Empire, and the Austrian Emperor Charles VI moved quickly. He granted Ostend a trade monopoly covering Africa and the East Indies. The Ostend Company was established and permitted to found colonies overseas. It was an extraordinary elevation for a coastal city that had spent decades being ransacked.

  The elevation did not last. In 1727, Dutch and British diplomatic pressure forced the dissolution of the Ostend Company. The episode captures something essential about Ostend's position in history - briefly at the centre of imperial ambition, then returned to the margins by the competing interests of larger powers. There had also been a Jewish community in Ostend recorded as early as the 16th century, a detail that points to the town's longer role as a place where different peoples and interests converged.

• 5. Royalty, Resorts, and a Diplomatic Bombshell

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  On the 19th of September 1826, the local artillery magazine exploded. At least 20 people were killed and a further 200 were injured. The affluent quarter of d'Hargras was levelled. Scarcely a building in the city escaped damage, and disease followed the devastation.

  Ostend recovered, and its character shifted. A railway connection with Brussels arrived in 1838. The first ferry to Dover sailed in 1846, making Ostend a transit harbour to England. Kings Leopold I and Leopold II both took their holidays in Ostend, and the Royal Family's attention brought construction of important monuments and villas, including the Hippodrome Wellington horse racing track and the Royal Galleries. Aristocratic Belgium followed the monarchs, and Ostend earned the name "the queen of the Belgian sea-side resorts."

  In October 1854, American envoys met in Ostend in a gathering that produced the Ostend Manifesto. Then in 1866, the city hosted a crucial meeting of exiled Spanish Liberals and Republicans. That meeting produced the Pact of Ostend, which laid the framework for a major uprising in Spain. Two years after those discussions, Spain's Glorious Revolution followed.

• 6. Two Wars and the Most Bombed City in Belgium

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  The Belle Epoque ended for Ostend in 1914. Germans placed anti-aircraft batteries along Fort Napoleon and in the dunes near the Onze-Lieve-Vrouw-ter-Duinenkerk. On the 15th of October, Ostend fell to the Germans without a fight, alongside Zeebrugge. German submarines and light naval forces were stationed there for much of World War I. The British Royal Navy attempted two naval raids near the end of the war: the first on the 23rd of April 1918, the second on the 9th of May 1918.

  Between the wars, Ostend hosted all of the sailing events for the 1920 Summer Olympics held in Antwerp, with only the finals of the 12 foot dinghy taking place in Amsterdam. The city also hosted the polo events.

  World War II brought destruction on a scale that dwarfed the first. The German invasion on the 10th of May 1940 triggered repeated Luftwaffe bombing raids. On the 24th of May, a beach hotel used as a hospital was hit by three German bombs, killing over 50 Belgian soldiers in the fire that followed. On the 25th of May, incendiary and brisance bombs killed 12 civilians. The last bombing raid on the 27th of May destroyed the city hall at the Wapenplein, along with the city archive and paintings by James Ensor and Leon Spilliaert. In total, the raids between the 21st and the 27th of May killed over 75 civilians and soldiers.

  After Germany stopped bombing in May 1940, the Royal Air Force began its own campaign, targeting the harbour repeatedly out of fear that Germany would use Ostend for an invasion of England. Canadian troops liberated the city on the 8th of September 1944. The final count: 407 Allied bombs had fallen on Ostend, making it the most bombed city in Belgium. No other Belgian city came close to that figure.

• 7. What Remains

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  After the war, the decision was made not to restore many of the damaged buildings. Civilian houses, luxury hotels, and public buildings were torn down and replaced with modernist apartment blocks. The demand came from the tourist sector, which needed volume over heritage.

  Today the James Ensor museum operates in the house where the painter lived from 1917 until 1949. The Mu.Zee, a merger of two earlier institutions, holds works by Ensor, Leon Spilliaert, Constant Permeke, and the post-war Belgian COBRA movement. Near the beach at Raversijde, a well-preserved section of the Atlantic Wall has been opened to the public as an outdoor museum.

  Ostend is still the largest city on the Belgian coast, drawing beach visitors to the Klein Strand near the pier in July and August. Its Winter in the Park festival draws more than 600,000 people each year. Ostend-Bruges International Airport, located 5 kilometres from the city, serves as the headquarters of TUI fly Belgium. The ferry route to Dover that began in 1846 ran for over a century and a half before TransEuropa Ferries collapsed in 2013, ending regular cross-channel service. The Coast Tram still connects Ostend to De Panne in the south and Knokke-Heist in the north.