Tour Noire from below

©Analia Glogowski/Lonely Planet

Tour Noire

Brussels


Boxed in on three sides and incongruously dwarfed by the back of a Novotel Hotel, this tower is an ivy-draped remnant of Brussels’ original city wall.

Transportation

  • metro: Ste-Catherine

Lonely Planet's must-see attractions

Nearby Brussels attractions

1. Église Ste-Catherine

0.05 MILES

Église Ste-Catherine must be one of the only religious buildings that positively encourages folks to urinate on its walls (there’s a ‘pissoir’ on its…

2. Église St-Jean-Baptiste au Béguinage

0.14 MILES

This soaring 1657 Flemish baroque masterpiece was designed by Luc Fayd’Herbe, a student of Rubens. It’s often cited as Belgium’s most beautiful church and…

3. Bruxella 1238

0.18 MILES

Bruxella 1238 is the scanty remains of a Franciscan convent that was bombarded into ruins in 1695. Most of the site is visible by peeping through the…

4. Bourse

0.2 MILES

The Bourse is Belgium’s 1873 stock-exchange building. It's closed to visitors, but you can enjoy its grandiose neoclassical facade, which is brilliantly…

5. Église St-Nicolas

0.21 MILES

Near the Bourse, this pint-sized church is as old as Brussels itself. What really makes it notable is its virtual invisibility – the exterior is almost…

6. Halles St-Géry

0.22 MILES

In 1881 this superb neo-Renaissance brick-and-wrought-iron meat market was built around a curious pyramidal monument-fountain (itself built to replace a…

7. Zinneke

0.23 MILES

In the old Bruxellois dialect, zinneke means ‘a person of mixed origins’, which sums up the city’s inhabitants to this day. Hence Flemish sculptor Tom…

8. Anspach Fountain

0.23 MILES

Surmounted by a tall granite tower topped by a bronze statue of St-Micheal, the fountain commemorates a former mayor.

  • placement: superzone
  • path: Destinations/POIs/superzone
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      "country": "Belgium",
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