Vlaams Gewest

The region changes as you move across it, and each stretch has its own temperament. The west is open and salt-aired, with polders cut by straight ditches, church spires visible for miles, and cattle standing in pasture that was reclaimed from the sea centuries ago. Travel east and the land tightens into the river country of the Scheldt and the Leie, where old merchant houses lean over quays and the canals hold reflections of gables. Further north and east the landscape loosens again. The Campine, the Kempen, is sandy heath and pine woodland, quiet enough that a cyclist can pass a whole village without seeing anyone. In the far east, Limburg brings orchards, rolling ground and a softer, more rural pace. In the south the ground lifts into the Flemish Ardennes, a run of wooded ridges and narrow lanes that feels almost out of place in a country so level.

A day in the region usually begins in a city and ends somewhere with more air. Bruges is the obvious place to start, and the medieval centre rewards walking without a fixed plan: a quiet canal behind the market square, a courtyard convent with its own silence, a bell carillon heard from several streets away. Ghent is less polished and more lived in, with its castle and its harbour quarter, and its students and dockworkers share the same cafés. Antwerp has the cathedral spire and the old port, plus a waterfront that has been reworked into something lighter and more open. The coast, which is part of the same region, runs as a long strip of dunes, wide beaches and seafront promenades lined with tall apartment blocks. Walk it in the late afternoon, when the tide has gone out and the sand is firm and reflective, and you can see the whole thing as one continuous line of land and sea.

What stays with you is the mix of scale. You can stand on a flat polder, see a belfry, a windmill and a motorway at once, and then, an hour later, be walking between beech trees on a ridge with no sound except birdsong. The region does not ask you to choose between town and country, or between sea and inland. It simply offers them side by side, and the wish to stay tends to arrive somewhere on the road between them, when the ditches are catching the last light and there is still one more village ahead worth seeing.