Things to do in Leuven

Landmark · Centre

A late-Gothic town hall built between 1448 and 1469 and encrusted with statues, standing across from a church that never got the towers it was designed for.

Local tip: The statues on the façade are nineteenth-century additions filling niches that stood empty for four centuries — which is why the building looks more medieval than it originally did. Sint-Pieterskerk opposite holds Dirk Bouts' Last Supper in the room it was painted for, and is quiet at almost any hour.

Nightlife · Centre, one street from the Grote Markt

A single rectangular square with bars along every side of it, universally advertised as the longest bar in Europe.

Local tip: It genuinely is one continuous run of terraces, and it fills from about ten rather than eight. Term time and holidays are two completely different squares — in August you can hear yourself think, and in November you cannot. If you are viewing a flat nearby, view it on a Thursday night.

Culture · South of the centre, on the Dijle

A walled village of brick houses, bridges and courtyards inside the city, inscribed by UNESCO as part of the Flemish Béguinages.

Local tip: The university bought it in the 1960s, restored it over decades and uses it as housing for students and visiting academics — so unlike most heritage sites it is fully inhabited, and you can walk through it at any hour because people live there. Getting a room in it is a genuine perk of an academic post here.

Landmark · Ladeuzeplein

A 1920s neo-Renaissance library rebuilt after being burned in 1914 and burned again in 1940, with a carillon tower you can climb.

Local tip: The building is a monument to two destructions: it was funded largely by American donors after the first fire and gutted again a quarter-century later. Climb the tower for the view over the roofs, and look at the balustrade inscriptions on the way up — the whole façade is an argument about the twentieth century. Jan Fabre's giant beetle pierced by a needle sits on the square below.

Food · The old canal dock, north of the centre

The industrial dock district around the original Stella Artois brewhouse, now a creative quarter of offices, bars and food halls.

Local tip: De Hoorn is the old brewery building itself, repurposed rather than demolished, and the surrounding Vaartkom is where the city has put its new housing and its evening economy that is not student-driven. It is a ten-minute walk from the Grote Markt and a completely different city — this is where locals in their thirties go.

Nature · Kapucijnenvoer, west of the centre

Belgium's oldest botanical garden, laid out in 1738 as a physic garden for the university's medical faculty.

Local tip: It is small, free, walled and almost always empty, which for a garden nearly three centuries old in the middle of a busy city is remarkable. The greenhouses are open in the afternoons. Students revising sit here in June and nobody else seems to know it exists.