Bruges, the port that overslept its own decline

Bruges owes both its medieval fortune and its present-day preservation to the same body of water, arriving and then, centuries later, leaving. The city grew up beside the Zwin, a tidal inlet connecting it to the North Sea, and by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that connection had made Bruges one of the wealthiest trading cities in northern Europe, a hub of the wool and cloth trade linking English fleeces to Flemish weavers and Italian and Hanseatic merchants who kept offices in the city to handle the business. The word bourse, still used across Europe for a stock exchange, is generally traced to the Van der Beurze family, who hosted merchants for trading in a square near their Bruges house, a detail that gives the city a fair claim to having hosted something close to the origins of organised European finance.

A channel that quietly closed the door

The Zwin's usefulness did not end abruptly. Through the fifteenth century, silting gradually reduced the depth of water reaching Bruges, forcing larger ships to unload further out and transfer goods onward by smaller boat, an increasingly costly inconvenience that made rival ports, Antwerp chief among them, progressively more attractive to merchants who could avoid it. By the sixteenth century, Bruges's role as northern Europe's leading commercial centre had passed decisively to Antwerp, and the city that had briefly rivalled anywhere in Europe for wealth settled into several centuries of relative economic quiet, its population falling and its grand medieval buildings left standing largely because nobody had the money, or the reason, to replace them.

A decline that became, eventually, the point

What in most cities would read as a straightforward story of economic failure became, over time, Bruges's principal asset. While other Flemish and Dutch cities rebuilt and modernised through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Bruges's long commercial eclipse meant its medieval street plan, canals and Gothic civic buildings survived largely undisturbed, a preservation by neglect that nineteenth-century Romantic writers and painters began to notice and celebrate specifically for its unmodernised, seemingly time-stopped character. The Belfry, the bell tower that has dominated the market square since the thirteenth century, and the Basilica of the Holy Blood, which has held a relic venerated since the twelfth century as a fragment of Christ's blood brought back from the Crusades, both stand today essentially as they did when the city's merchants were still arguing over wool prices in the square below.

A canal network built for barges, kept for boats

The canals that once carried Bruges's trade now carry, for the most part, tourists rather than cargo, threaded through the old town on routes largely unchanged since the medieval period, past the Beguinage, a walled community founded in the thirteenth century for lay religious women, and under a succession of stone bridges that give the city its enduring, and not entirely inaccurate, comparison to Venice. The comparison would have struck a medieval Bruges merchant as entirely reasonable: both cities built their fortunes on being the place goods had to pass through, before the geography that made that possible quietly moved on without them.

Getting to Bruges

Ambassador's Chocolates, Lace & Mini-Cruise to Medieval Bruges, two nights from London Tilbury, is the most direct route, a short overnight crossing to Zeebrugge with a full day in the old town. Fred. Olsen's Belgium Mini-Cruise, three nights from Southampton, adds Ghent to the same trip.

Around the festive season, the Christmas Markets Cruise – Belgium extends the visit to take in the market and ice rink that fill the Markt square through December.

A single day covers the Belfry, the Basilica and a walk along the main canal loop comfortably; the city's genuine trick is that almost nothing has been added to it in five centuries, which leaves a visitor with rather more time on their hands than most historic centres allow.