Belgium makes 80% of the world's billiard balls, peaks at just 694 metres, and has more castles per square kilometre...
Everyone thinks they know Belgium. Cobblestones. Beer. Waffles. Chocolate. The Tour of Flanders on a grey April Sunday with 50,000 people on a muddy berg and someone’s dad crying into his Jupiler.
That’s all real. But it’s not the whole story. Here are the things about Belgium that most cyclists — even the ones who’ve ridden the Koppenberg, drunk the Kwaremont, and eaten frites at the finish — still don’t know.
Belgium is roughly the size of Maryland. Inside it, there are more than 3,000 castles — more per square kilometre than any other country in the world, with around 300 open to the public. The rest are just… there. On a ridge. Behind a tree line. At the end of a farm track you’ll turn down by accident on day two of a tour.
This is not a country that makes a fuss about its castles. There are no signs. No gift shops on the approach. You’ll be deep in the Ardennes, grinding up a climb that your legs are begging you to stop on, and you’ll crest the top and see a 14th-century fortress across the valley, completely unremarked upon, as if it were a barn. It is a very Belgian thing to have extraordinary things and treat them like furniture.
Riders who come to Belgium for the Spring Classics spend several days riding through one of Europe‘s densest collections of medieval architecture without ever quite registering it, because all their attention is on the road surface twelve inches in front of their wheel. Which is understandable. But a shame.
Belgium has no legally mandated closing time. Bars are not required to shut. Ever.
This is worth sitting with for a moment, especially if you’re from North America, where last call is a law of nature somewhere between gravity and death and taxes. In Belgium, the decision of when to stop serving is left entirely to the bar owner, who typically makes this decision based on whether anyone is still there and whether they themselves would like to go to bed.
This is not a loophole or a quirk. It is a considered position on the relationship between adults and alcohol, which Belgium has been thinking about for a long time. Belgian beer culture is UNESCO-recognised intangible cultural heritage — in the same category as Fado for the Portuguese and tango for Argentinians.
There are over 1,500 types of Belgian beer. The Trappist monasteries of the Ardennes have been brewing since the Middle Ages. The Orval Abbey, deep in the forest near the Luxembourg border, produces one beer — one — and has done so since 1931. It is one of only thirteen breweries in the world permitted to use the Authentic Trappist Product label. You can drink it at a table outside the 12th-century ruins that the monks are still restoring, if you want to feel appropriately small.
For cyclists, the post-ride beer in Belgium is not a reward. It is a cultural institution. The Kwaremont beer is 6.6% alcohol — precisely matching the gradient of the Oude Kwaremont climb it’s named after, served in a glass with a base designed to look like cobblestones. This level of commitment to the bit is very Belgium.
Flandrien.
You won’t find an equivalent in French, Spanish, English, or any other language, because the thing it describes doesn’t really exist anywhere else. A Flandrien is not the strongest rider, not the most aerodynamically gifted — it is the one who keeps turning the pedals on the cobbles in driving rain and crosswind until everyone else has cracked. Endurance as identity. Suffering as a personal philosophy.
The word has a history that makes it more interesting still. It was originally an insult — used for Flemish seasonal workers who travelled to French mines, seen as rough, stubborn, expendable. It became a badge of honour. The cycling culture of Flanders took that word, which was meant to diminish, and turned it into the highest compliment the region knows how to give.
Eddy Merckx — the greatest racing cyclist who ever lived, winner of five Tours de France, eleven Monuments, and 525 professional races — is called a Flandrien. He grew up in Brussels, which isn’t even Flanders. It doesn’t matter. The Flandrien ideal is about character, not geography: the rider who refuses to be broken by conditions. It is a moral category as much as a cycling one.
The Spring Classics — the E3 Saxo Classic, Dwars door Vlaanderen, the Tour of Flanders — exist in part as an annual test of who qualifies. The weather cooperates with this. It almost always rains.
You don’t earn the title by watching.
Three of them, in fact. The Cycling Tour of Flanders rides the bergs — Koppenberg, Paterberg, Oude Kwaremont — guided by Arno, who has spent his career on these roads and will not let you walk the Koppenberg without at least attempting it first. The Flanders & Ardennes tour covers both regions: cobbles in the north, the long Ardennes climbs and castle-dotted valleys in the south. And the Belgium Cycling Holiday, which Arno diplomatically describes as featuring the Monuments “a little less” — but which does not, we should be clear, feature the post-ride beer any less.
The bars don’t close. The castles aren’t going anywhere. The roads are exactly as hard as you’ve been told.
