Three days in Leuven: a town of forty thousand students and one very long bar

Brabantine Gothic taken past the point of reason: six turrets, three storeys of niches and more than two hundred statues on the outside, added in the 19th century to fill niches that had stood empty since the 1400s. The building went up between 1448 and 1469 and survived two wars that flattened the streets around it.

The church opposite, burnt by the Germans in 1914 and hit again in 1944, with a tower that was never finished because the ground would not carry it. The treasury holds Dieric Bouts's Last Supper of 1468, one of the great paintings of the Flemish 15th century, still in the church that commissioned it.

A bronze student on the corner of the square, pouring a glass of beer into his own head while reading a book, officially the Fountain of Wisdom and universally called Fonske. Put up in 1975 and dressed by the town for anniversaries and football matches.

A brewpub in a courtyard off the market square that makes its own beer and sells it nowhere else, which means the only way to try it is to sit down. Wooden tables, a long bar and a menu of things designed to be eaten alongside it.

About forty bars stand shoulder to shoulder around one rectangle, and in term time the crowd spills across the cobbles between them. Nobody dresses up, nothing costs much, and the last of them close when the last customer leaves.

A walled town within the town: brick houses, cobbled lanes, bridges over the Dijle and a church, built from the 13th century for women living a religious life without taking vows. The university bought it in 1962 and restored it, and its houses are now student and staff accommodation, which is why the washing is real. On the UNESCO list, free to walk through, and quiet by rule.

A turreted 16th century château in Heverlee that the dukes of Arenberg gave to the university, now full of engineering students. The building is not open for tours but the park around it is, and the walk in from the north gate under the beeches is the point.

The campus streets have cheap student canteens and a couple of decent cafes. Eat before the abbey rather than after; there is very little out there.

A Norbertine abbey founded in 1129 and still standing as a complete working landscape: gatehouse, church, cloister, mill, fish ponds and farm buildings, with a museum of religious art in the abbey rooms. The 17th century moulded plaster ceilings in the library and the refectory are the reason to make the trip out.

A Flemish Renaissance library built with American money in the 1920s to replace the one the German army burnt in 1914, then burnt again in 1940 and rebuilt a second time. The tower can be climbed to the carillon and the balcony, and the square in front holds a giant beetle on a needle, put there by Jan Fabre, which the students have been explaining to their parents ever since.

The city museum, five minutes from the library, mixing medieval sculpture and Flemish painting with contemporary shows in a building that stitches an old house and a new gallery together. The ticket also gets you into the treasury under Saint Peter's, so keep it if you did not go in on the first day.

Ten minutes straight down the Bondgenotenlaan. Trains to Brussels leave several times an hour and take 25 minutes, and the airport is thirteen minutes in the other direction.