Bruges Layover Near the Minnewater

Bruges’ Minnewater has a 1398 powder tower on its bank, a working brewery two minutes off it, and a convent courtyard that costs nothing to walk into. All three sit in the green southern end of the old town, and the whole loop is flat, short and a long way from the crowds on the main squares.

De Halve Maan’s 45-minute brewery tour on the Walplein

The Maes family has run this brewery since 1856 and is still running it six generations on, which is rarer in Belgium than the marketing on every bar in the country would suggest. The tour runs daily between eleven and four in Dutch, French and English, costs 11 euros booked online or 12 paid at the door, and finishes with a glass of Brugse Zot blond. It also involves a lot of stairs, including a stop on the roof with the belfry and the church spires laid out in front of you.

The strangest thing about the place is not on the tour route. In 2016 the brewery finished a beer pipeline: a 3.2-kilometre polyethylene line running under the medieval streets from the Walplein out to its bottling plant on the edge of the city, capable of moving about 4,000 litres an hour and taking several hundred tanker journeys a year off the cobbles. It was the first of its kind anywhere. There is nothing to see, which is the point, and it is buried up to 34 metres down at the deepest.

The Beguinage courtyard and its one open house

Ten Wijngaerde was founded in 1245 for lay religious women who wanted a shared life without taking vows, and it has been continuously occupied ever since; Benedictine sisters live in the whitewashed houses today. That is why it feels different from every other courtyard in Bruges: the signs at the gate ask for quiet, the lawn is not a place to sit down and eat, and the gates close in the evening whether you are finished or not.

One of the houses is open as a small museum, for about 2 euros: a few low green-panelled rooms furnished as a beguine would have kept them, with a hearth, a cupboard of crockery and a walled kitchen garden out the back. It takes fifteen minutes and it is the only door in the whole courtyard a visitor can actually open.

Because it is a convent with posted rules rather than a park, this is not somewhere to turn up wheeling a suitcase across the gravel between the houses.

The Poertoren, an 18-metre powder tower on the Minnewater

Jan Van Oudenaarde built it between 1398 and 1401 as part of the city’s outer defences, and it has spent most of its life storing things nobody wanted near the houses: the municipal gunpowder from 1477, then ice, after 1785, once the guns stopped mattering. It is about eight metres across with walls somewhere near a metre and a third thick, which is why it is still standing when most of the wall it belonged to is not.

Nothing about it is open. You look at it from the arched bridge or the path along the Begijnenvest, with the water and the swans in front, and that is the whole of it. The lake itself was the city’s inland harbour basin before it became a park, which explains the straight edges. It is open ground with no gate and no hours, so it is the one stop here that works before breakfast or after dark, unlike everything in the wider Bruges itinerary that runs on opening times.

Trains to the airport leave eight minutes down the road

Bruges station is the closest point on this list to a train, about eight minutes’ walk south-west along the Begijnenvest, which makes the Minnewater the natural last stop before a departure rather than the first thing you do. Intercity lines 23 and 23A run from there to Brussels Airport-Zaventem without a change in a little under an hour and a half.

Those eight minutes are the argument for ending here rather than starting here. The Beguinage gate shuts in the early evening and the brewery stops running tours in the late afternoon, but the lake outside them has no closing time at all, so a late departure leaves you somewhere worth waiting.