This is going to be a bit of a retro post, rewinding back to the 5th of May when we spent a long weekend in the beautiful medieval city of Brugge.
It is one of those cities that is achingly beautiful and truly lives up to its hype of being breathtaking to behold.
The well preserved medieval city centre is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is traversed by canals giving it the nick name 'Venice of the North'. Unlike Venice though, access through the canals are restricted to the licensed tour boats only, which in turn helps in the preservation of its truly old and historic buildings.
Even the hotel that we stayed in, Hotel Ter Brughe dates back officially to 1470 with it's vaulted basement going back further to 1200's!
This vaulted basement has been converted to a spacious room and is just above the canal level so when you open the windows you have the canal just right in front of you, and sometimes swans swim by to say hello (or beg for food rather). Yep, it was our room during our stay in the city and felt priviledged to have slept in a very, very old room...
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| As our hotel room overlooked a canal, we had visitors each morning. |
Two to three days in Brugge is highly recommended, to soak in the sights, chocolate, beer, and delicious cuisine.
Mark :-)
This gardening blog follows our journey as we create our Tropical and Exotic themed garden. We hope you'll enjoy the journey as much as we do. We started our Exotic Garden in 2005 and this site will show its development, as well as our travels, both abroad and within the UK to gardens, nurseries and friends.
Sigh! "Achingly beautiful" is absolutely the right words to describe it. What wonderful photos, lately I've been feeling -- how can I put it? -- the lack of deep history here in the U.S. or perhaps noticing the depth of history everywhere in Europe (but especially the U.K., Nigel's homeland). Perhaps I've just seen too many episodes of Escape to the Country on Youtube.
ReplyDeleteYou're long overdue a visit to the old continent and Nigel's homeland :) haven't been to mainland Greece yet but whenever we go to Italy the sense of history is even stronger than in England, especially they have so many well preserved historic building and structures that goes waay back...
DeleteYou had me hooked from that first photo! It's almost unfathomable to me that cities like that still exist.
ReplyDeleteSo glad it's well preserved!
DeleteGorgeous! How lucky that you got the vaulted basement room. Did you feed your morning visitors? They're quite handsome.
ReplyDelete