Bois de la Cambre

The Bois de la Cambre is Brussels' largest park — a 124-hectare English landscape garden at the southern end of Avenue Louise that provides the green space that the dense, built-up city centre desperately needs. The park was designed by Edouard Keilig in the 1860s and includes a lake with an island (accessible by a small ferry), meadows, mature trees, and the kind of winding paths that were designed to make you forget you're in a city.

The park connects directly to the Forêt de Soignes — one of the largest remaining beech forests in Europe, which extends 44 square kilometres south of Brussels and contains trees old enough to have been standing when the city was founded. The transition from urban park to genuine forest happens gradually, and a walk that begins in the Bois de la Cambre can extend for hours into the Soignes without ever returning to a road. The beech cathedral — a section of the forest where the trees grow so tall and straight that their canopy resembles the vaulted ceiling of a Gothic church — is the most photogenic section and is accessible by a marked trail from the park.

On weekends, the park fills with Brussels' outdoor culture — joggers, cyclists, families with picnic blankets, and the informal football and frisbee games that occupy every available lawn. The Chalet Robinson, a restaurant on the island in the lake, is reachable by a small boat and provides a dining experience that feels improbably rural for a location 4 kilometres from the Grand-Place.