On the Trail of the Dutch Masters

A maze of pretty waterways, coffeehouses and museums brimming with Golden Age masterpieces: Amsterdam is one of Europe’s most unforgettable capitals, a city that takes high culture as seriously as hedonism. Whether explored on foot, boat or bike – the transport of choice for Amsterdammers, of course – its cool, laid-back collage of districts is stitched together with cobbles and canals: browse the boutiques along De 9 Straatjes, people-watch from Jordaan’s storied bruin (‘brown’) cafes or roam the artsy, leafy streets of De Pijp. 

Like a storybook illustration, Bruges has a timeless, almost fantastical beauty to it: a jumble of step-gabled houses and Gothic belfries, the scents of Belgian fritjes (fries) and sculpted chocolate tempting from all directions. And yet the city is at its most enchanting by the water, where boats glide beneath stone bridges and willows toss their fair green locks into winding, narrow canals. 

The birthplace of Tintin and home to the mischievous Manneken Pis, Brussels scarcely deserves its reputation as a city of bureaucrats. It is a visual feast, replete with gilded Flemish buildings and Victor Horta’s flourishes of art nouveau, while comic-style street art and tongue-in-cheek statues illustrate the Belgians’ good humor. Museums, charting everything from natural history and fine arts, are as distinguished as the chocolate shops, and then there is the beer: a whole world of its own, running from blond lagers to fermented, cidery gueuzes. 

Luxembourg’s cream-white castles and palaces, set amid the craggy gorges of the Alzette and Pétrusse rivers, have a certain fairytale quality to them. Indeed, there is something fanciful about the capital of the world’s last Grand Duchy; a tiny nation of just over half a million people sandwiched between France and Germany, it is a relative mystery on European adventures, but no less fascinating. Discover the nation’s turbulent past in the city museum, escape to the waterfalls of the Mullerthal or walk the Chemin de la Corniche, winding along the city’s 17th-century ramparts, for breathtaking views