Antwerp, and the river that made Rubens rich

Antwerp sits on the River Scheldt, wide and tidal enough at this point to bring seagoing ships directly to the city's quays, a geographical advantage Bruges, dependent on a channel that had silted beyond usefulness, could no longer offer by the sixteenth century. Merchants, bankers and craftsmen shifted their business accordingly, and for much of the sixteenth century Antwerp functioned as one of the most important commercial and financial centres in Europe, a position from which it financed trade across the continent and beyond, until religious war and a Spanish-led siege in 1585 ended the boom and sent a large share of its merchant class, many of them Protestant, fleeing north to Amsterdam, carrying a good deal of the expertise that helped build that city's own Golden Age in the process.

The painter who rebuilt the city's reputation

Antwerp's second great period of prosperity, in the early seventeenth century, is closely bound up with a single figure: Peter Paul Rubens, who trained in Italy before returning to settle permanently in the city in 1608 and building, over the following decades, one of the largest and most productive painting workshops in European history. Rubens worked for European courts and the Catholic Church alike, producing enormous, dynamic religious and mythological canvases at a scale and pace that required a substantial team of assistants and specialists working under his direction, and his success brought both wealth and prestige back to a city that had lost a good deal of both in the previous century's upheaval.

Two of Rubens's largest and best-known altarpieces, The Elevation of the Cross and The Descent from the Cross, still hang in Antwerp's Cathedral of Our Lady, a Gothic building whose spire, completed in the sixteenth century, remains the tallest church tower in the Low Countries. The cathedral took close to two centuries to build in stages and stands today essentially as Rubens himself would have known it, the two altarpieces installed not long after his return to the city and intended, from the outset, as much as a display of Antwerp's restored wealth and confidence as an act of religious devotion.

A trade that moved from cloth to carbon

Antwerp's more recent economic history has revolved around a different kind of precious cargo. The city became a major centre of the global diamond trade from the late nineteenth century onwards, drawing skilled cutters and dealers, many of them from the city's historic Jewish community, to a district near the central station still known today for its concentration of diamond exchanges and workshops, handling a substantial share of the world's rough and polished diamond trade even as the industry has globalised in recent decades. The port itself, meanwhile, expanded through the twentieth century into one of the largest in Europe, handling container and chemical traffic on a scale the sixteenth-century merchants who first exploited the Scheldt's depth could scarcely have imagined, though the underlying logic, a deep river reaching far inland, remains exactly the one that built the city's first fortune.

Calling at Antwerp

Antwerp appears on several sailings that combine the Low Countries with a wider tour of the Channel coast. Canals & Cafés of Belgium & Holland, five nights from Newcastle, calls at Antwerp directly on the Scheldt before continuing to Amsterdam.

Historic Harbours of Normandy & Brittany, nine nights from Dundee, adds an Antwerp call to a longer tour of the French coast, while the France & Belgium Easter Break from Southampton pairs the city with a passage up the Seine to Rouen.

A day is enough for the cathedral and a walk around the Grote Markt, with its guild houses facing the town hall in a display of civic wealth Rubens himself would have recognised as entirely in character for the city that made him rich.