Antwerp

The medieval building and 1622 courtyard garden alone would be worth a visit, but it's the world's oldest printing press, priceless manuscripts and original type sets that justify this museum's Unesco World Heritage status. It's been a museum since 1876 and its other great highlights include a 1640 library, a bookshop dating from 1700 and rooms lined with gilt leather.

Belgium’s finest Gothic cathedral was 169 years in the making (1352–1521). Wherever you wander in Antwerp, its gracious, 123m-high spire has a habit of popping unexpectedly into view and it rarely fails to prompt a gasp of awe. The sight is particularly well framed when looking up Pelgrimstraat in the afternoon light.

This delightfully indulgent 1611 mansion was built as a home and studio for celebrated painter Pieter Paul Rubens. It was rescued from ruins in 1937 and has been very sensitively restored with furniture that dates from Rubens’ era plus a priceless collection of 17th-century art. There are around a dozen Rubens canvases, most memorably his world-famous hatted self-portrait and a large-scale canvas of Eve glancing lustfully at Adam's fig leaf.

In a stunningly repurposed old military-hospital chapel, the Jane's sublime two-Michelin-star dining is such an overwhelmingly fabulous experience that you'll need to book online exactly three months ahead…on the dot of 8am.

Styled as a 16th-century town house, this superb place was actually constructed in 1904 as one of the first museums in the world built around a single collection. Fritz Mayer van den Bergh's collection is indeed as rich as that of many a national gallery with its notable paintings, sculptures, tapestries, drawings, jewellery and stained-glass windows. The undoubted highlight is the Brueghel Room, whose centrepiece is Pieter Brueghel the Elder's brilliantly grotesque Dulle Griet (Mad Meg), painted in 1561 and restored in 2018.

Four matching corner houses face off across a Zurenborg junction, with glaze-brick exteriors enlivened by fine mosaic work and triangular protruding box windows.

With its neo-Gothic facade, vast main hall and splendidly proportioned dome, the 1905 Antwerpen-Centraal building has been rated as one of the five most beautiful train stations in the world.

Much of multicultural Borgerhout feels very run down so the area remains way off most visitors' radars. However, the stirrings of a future regeneration are showing through in a scattering of truly excellent bars that have managed to retain a local quality while offering an exciting sense of discovery for those willing to go well beyond the tourist zone.

M HKA is considered to be one of Belgium's best contemporary galleries. Its exhibitions focus on work produced since the 1970s by both Belgian and international artists. Shows change frequently and tend to be provocative.

In a series of old warehouses transformed by an artists' collective, this magical hang-out has concrete floors, barely hanging together arrays of old windows, and a supersized rickshaw on the big dock-front terrace. Add excellent cheap, well-chosen local beers and it's no surprise that Paniek is the latest Antwerp in-place.