Royal Palace of Brussels

The Royal Palace of Brussels is the Belgian monarch's official palace — a neoclassical building on the Place des Palais that is larger than Buckingham Palace (a fact Belgians enjoy mentioning) and is open to the public every summer from late July through early September, giving visitors access to the state rooms, the throne room, and the Mirror Room, whose ceiling was covered in 2002 with the iridescent wing cases of 1.6 million Thai jewel beetles by artist Jan Fabre.

The beetle ceiling is the palace's most talked-about feature — a shimmering green canopy of insect exoskeletons that catches the light and creates patterns that shift as you move beneath them. It's either a masterpiece of contemporary art or deeply unsettling, and most visitors experience both reactions simultaneously. Fabre's installation, titled 'Heaven of Delight,' was commissioned by the royal family and is now a permanent feature of the palace.

The palace's facade, rebuilt in the Louis XVI style in 1904, faces the Parc de Bruxelles — a formal French garden that separates the palace from the Belgian Parliament building, creating a visual axis of power that mirrors the relationship between monarchy and democracy in the Belgian constitutional system. The Belgian royal family does not actually live in the palace (they reside at the Royal Domain of Laeken in northern Brussels), but the building serves as the official workplace and ceremonial centre of the monarchy. The summer opening is free, and the combination of state rooms, contemporary art, and the chance to walk through a palace that outscales Buckingham makes it one of Brussels' best seasonal attractions.