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The Grand-Place , one of Europe's most beautiful squares, is tucked away amid the tangle of ancient cobbled lanes that lies at the heart of Brussels. It's the Gothic magnificence of the Hotel de Ville - the town hall - which first draws the eye, but in its shadow is an exquisite sequence of late seventeenth-century guildhouses, whose gilded facades with their columns, scrolled gables and dainty sculptures encapsulate the Baroque ideals of exuberance and complexity. There's no better place to get the flavour of Brussels' past, and, as you nurse a coffee watching the crowds from one of the pavement cafes, its Eurocapital present. Originally marshland, the Grand-Place was drained in the twelfth century, and by 1350 a covered market for bread, meat and textiles had appeared, born of an economic boom underpinned by a flourishing cloth industry. The market was so successful that it soon expanded beyond the boundaries of the square - hence the names of the warren of narrow streets around it: rues au Beurre and des Bouchers, marches aux Herbes, aux Poulets and aux Fromages. On the square itself, the city's merchants built themselves their headquarters, the guildhouses that cemented the Grand-Place's role as the commercial hub of the emergent city. In the fifteenth century, with the building of the Hotel de Ville, the square took on a civic and political function too, with the ruling dukes descending from their Upper Town residence to hold audiences and organize tournaments. Official decrees and pronouncements were also read here, and rough justice was meted out with public executions. In 1482, however, Brussels, along with the rest of the Low Countries, became a fiefdom of the Habsburgs and the city was effectively demoted. In addition, the role of the Grand-Place was transformed by that most Catholic of Habsburgs, Philip II of Spain (1555-98), who turned the square's public executions into religious events as he strove to crush the city's Protestants. These were the opening shots of a bitter religious war that was to rack the Low Countries for the next hundred years. Initially, the repression cowed the city, but in 1565 the Protestant guildsmen and their apprentices struck back with widespread rioting. Shortly afterwards, an enraged Philip dispatched a massive Spanish army to crush his heretical subjects, and in anticipation of its arrival, thousands fled the city and, as the local economy collapsed, many more died of famine.
From Tuesday to Sunday from March to the end of October, there's a modest flower and plant market on the Grand-Place (8am-6pm).
Religious conflict dogged the city for another twenty years, but when the Habsburgs finally captured the town in 1585 they were surprisingly generous, granting a general amnesty and promising to honour ancient municipal privileges. The city's economy revived and the Grand-Place resumed its role as a commercial centre. Of the square's medieval buildings, however, only parts of the Hotel de Ville and one guildhouse survive today, the consequence of a 36-hour French artillery bombardment which pretty much razed Brussels to the ground in 1695. Unperturbed, the city's guilds swiftly had their headquarters rebuilt, using their control of the municipal council both to impose regulations on the sort of construction that was permitted and to ward off the Habsburg governor's notions of a royal - as distinct from bourgeois - main square. The council was not to be trifled with. In an early example of urban planning, it decreed "(We) hereby forbid the owners to build houses on the lower market [ie the Grand-Place] without the model of the facade ... first being presented to the Council ... Any construction erected contrary to this provision shall be demolished at the expense of the offender." By these means, the guilds were able to create a homogeneous Grand-Place, choosing to rebuild in a distinctive and flamboyant Baroque which made the square more ornate and more imposing than before. This magisterial self-confidence was, in fact, misplaced, and the factories that were soon to render the guilds obsolete were already colonizing parts of the city. The industrialization of the city effectively becalmed the Grand-Place, and hence it has survived pretty much intact to this day.
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