Belgium

Belgium begins at a short North Sea shore of dunes, with polders behind it drained from old marshes. Flanders is low and flat, cut by the Scheldt as it widens towards Antwerp. South of the Sambre and the Meuse the ground rises into the Ardennes, a plateau of beech and spruce forest, deep valleys and the peat bogs of the High Fens, where Botrange is the country’s highest point. Rain falls in every season.

Julius Caesar fought the Belgae here. In the Middle Ages Bruges, Ghent and Ypres grew rich weaving English wool into cloth, and under the dukes of Burgundy Jan van Eyck brought oil painting to a new precision. Spain, Austria, France and the Netherlands ruled in turn until a riot after an opera in Brussels in August 1830 grew into a revolution. Leopold II ran the Congo as his private possession until 1908, through brutal forced labour. German armies occupied the country in both world wars.

Flemings in the north and Walloons in the south, with a small German-speaking community near Eupen, share a federal state. Comics are a serious art, from Hergé’s Tintin to Peyo’s Smurfs, and Bruegel, Rubens and Magritte painted here. Monks at Westmalle, Orval and Chimay brew Trappist ales, and frites come with mayonnaise, often beside a pot of mussels. Eddy Merckx won the Tour de France five times. Antwerp’s port feeds a vast chemical complex and a diamond trade, and Wallonia makes vaccines.