Three days in Liège: the least pretty city in Belgium, and the warmest
Two nights on the Meuse, a prince-bishop's palace and the ruins under the square, 373 steps up to the citadel, and the Sunday market along the river.
- Length
- 3 days, 2 nights
- Where you stay
- Liège
- Places
- 7 across 3 days
Liège will not charm you at the station, unless the station is the point, and it might be: Calatrava's white ribs and glass vault opened here in 2009 and are the best piece of architecture built in Belgium this century. Beyond it the city is steep, scruffy, half industrial and unmistakably French-speaking, with none of the Flemish neatness an hour up the line.
It is also the friendliest city in the country and the one where you eat best for the least money. For eight centuries this was an independent prince-bishopric, ruled by a churchman rather than a duke and answering to nobody in Brussels, and something of that stubbornness survives. So does the sense of humour: the city mascot is a puppet in a smock who was rude about authority.
Two nights is enough for the centre and leaves room for the thing you did not expect to enjoy. An afternoon on the square where the cathedral was pulled down, a day among the old town collections and the river, and a last morning in the treasury of the church that took its place.
Highlights
- The Archéoforum, a Roman villa and three lost cathedrals under a modern square
- Montagne de Bueren, 373 steps straight up the hillside, with the whole city behind you at the top
- A brass baptismal font cast around 1118, standing on twelve oxen, and the finest thing in the Meuse valley
- Boulet frites and a glass of péquet in a cafe where the decor has not moved in fifty years
- La Batte on a Sunday morning, a market that has run along this quay for six hundred years
Where to stay
Liège, two nights by the river
Stay between the Place Saint-Lambert and the Meuse. That puts the old town, the market quay and the restaurants within ten minutes on foot, and the station a bus ride away rather than a hike.
Rooms here cost markedly less than in Flanders for the same standard, which is the compensation for a city that has to be given a chance rather than falling on you at first sight. Le Carré is loud until three in the morning at weekends; one street back is fine.
Day by day
Day 1 in Liège
The palace, the dig under the square, and the long staircase
The Place Saint-Lambert is where the city starts and where it lost its cathedral: the revolutionaries of the 1790s pulled down the biggest church in the Low Countries stone by stone, and the square has been an argument about what to put there ever since.
Start with the palace on its north side, go underneath the square to see what the demolition left, and finish the afternoon on the staircase up the hillside. Go up for the light on the way down.
- 15:00
Palace of the Prince-Bishops
VisitThe seat of the prince-bishops who ruled Liège as an independent state until 1794, rebuilt from 1526 around two courtyards. The first is open to walk into: sixty stubby columns, each carved differently, with grotesque faces that were meant to be read as a lesson in folly. The building is a law court and provincial government now, so you visit the yards rather than the rooms.
- 16:15
archéoforum
CultureUnder the square, the layers of everything that stood here: a Roman villa, a Merovingian church, and the foundations of the three successive cathedrals of Saint Lambert, the last of them demolished after the revolution. Entered from a modest doorway on the square, and much larger inside than it looks.
- 18:00
Montagne de Bueren
OtherA straight brick staircase of 373 steps running up the hillside to the citadel, built in 1881 so that soldiers could reach the barracks without walking through the bars of the old town. Gardens and small houses on either side, a view over the whole valley at the top, and no handrail worth the name in the middle.
- 19:30
Café Lequet
EatA pub kitchen where the boulets have been made the same way for decades, in a room that has not been redecorated in living memory and is the better for it. Cash, brusque service, and the best plate of food in the city for under twenty euros.
With more time: The bars of Le Carré start filling around ten and there is a small house nearby that serves nothing but péquet, in flavours that range from juniper to whatever fruit is in season. One is a local custom, three is a mistake.
Day 2 in Liège
Mosan art, an arms dealer's palace and the park
The old town along the Féronstrée holds most of the museums, and two of them are worth the day on their own. Take the morning slowly: they are three minutes apart.
In the afternoon cross to the island in the Meuse, where the city art collection sits in a palace left over from a world's fair, in a park that is the best place in Liège to do nothing.
- 10:00
Curtius Palace
HistoricAn eight storey red brick and stone mansion of about 1600, built by a man who made a fortune selling gunpowder and weapons to the Spanish crown. Since 2009 it has held the city's archaeology, decorative arts, glass and weapons collections in one route, and the Mosan metalwork on the way through is the part to slow down for.
- 12:15
Saint Barthélémy Church
ReligiousA squat Romanesque church in banded stone, the last of the seven collegiate churches of Liège to be built, and inside it the brass font cast by Renier de Huy around 1118: five baptism scenes in high relief on a bowl standing on twelve oxen. It is one of the great works of medieval Europe and it sits in a parish church with a coin box for the lights.
- 13:30
Lunch on the way to the river
EatThe streets between the museums and the quay have brasseries doing a set lunch for less than a sandwich costs in Bruges. Take the one with the handwritten board.
- 15:00
La Boverie
CultureThe one pavilion left from the world's fair of 1905, on an island in the Meuse, extended in 2016 with a glass and concrete wing that hangs over the water. Inside is the city's art collection, from the Renaissance to Picasso and Chagall, plus the big touring exhibition of the season. The park around it is full of runners, cyclists and people asleep on the grass.
With more time: With a spare afternoon, two things outside the city are better than anything else in it: the fort at Loncin, blown apart by a German shell in August 1914 and left as it fell over the men still inside, and the coal mine at Blegny, where a cage takes you down the original shaft and the guides are former miners.
Day 3 in Liège
The treasury, and the train
The last morning is one church and one small museum inside it, five minutes from the middle of town and twenty from the station.
When the old cathedral came down, the chapter moved here and brought the treasure with it, which is why an ordinary Gothic collegiate church now holds one of the great reliquaries of the late Middle Ages.
- 10:00
La Cathédrale Saint Paul de Liège
ReligiousGothic, 13th to 15th century, promoted to cathedral in 1802 after the revolutionaries demolished the old one. The cloister and the treasury hold the reliquary that Charles the Bold gave the city in 1471 as an apology for having sacked it three years earlier, a kneeling gold duke presented by Saint George, and it is worth the ticket on its own.
- 11:45
Waffle, then Guillemins
NoteBuy a Liège waffle from a van rather than a shop, eat it walking, and allow twenty minutes down the boulevard to the station, or take a bus from the Place Saint-Lambert.
With more time: If the train is late in the day and it happens to be a Sunday, do nothing else: walk the quay from one end of the market to the other and eat your way along it.
Before you go
Getting in and getting around
Liège-Guillemins is an hour from Brussels by intercity train and sits on the high speed line, so Cologne is about an hour and Paris a little over two. From Brussels Airport it is around an hour and a quarter. The station is 20 minutes' walk south of the centre, or a short bus ride, and it is worth ten minutes of looking at before you leave it.
The centre is walkable and the hillside is not. Everything on the flat, between the river and the Place Saint-Lambert, is close together; the citadel and the terraces above it involve either a long staircase or a bus.
Buses are run by TEC and take contactless payment. There is no metro, and taxis are best ordered rather than hailed.
Sunday, and the market
If you can arrange your dates around one thing, make it a Sunday morning. La Batte runs along the quay for a couple of kilometres from early morning until around two in the afternoon, selling food, plants, clothes, birds, cheese and a great deal of nonsense, and it has been happening in some form since the 16th century. It is the biggest market in Belgium and the closest thing the city has to a national holiday every week.
Museums here mostly close on Monday, so a Saturday to Monday trip loses more than a Sunday to Tuesday one.
What to eat and drink
Boulets à la liégeoise are large meatballs in a dark sweet-sour sauce made with sirop de Liège, a thick fruit syrup boiled down from pears and apples. They come with chips and they are the local dish, served in the same handful of cafes for generations. Order the salade liégeoise, green beans with bacon and potato, if you want the other one.
Péquet is the local jenever, drunk cold in small glasses and often flavoured with fruit. The Liège waffle is denser than the Brussels one, made with pearl sugar that caramelises on the iron, and is properly eaten from a van in the street rather than a cafe.
The nightlife concentrates in Le Carré, a grid of narrow streets north of the Opera, where students drink until the small hours. It is loud, cheap and largely harmless.
Language and safety
This is a French-speaking city and the level of English is lower than in Flanders. A few words of French are appreciated and often necessary, particularly in the cafes worth eating in.
Liège has a reputation among Belgians for being rough, which is largely about districts you will not visit. The centre, Le Carré and the riverside are ordinary city streets: keep an eye on bags around the station and at the Sunday market, and there is nothing else to think about.
Liège is a city that has been knocked about, by the French, by two German invasions and by the collapse of coal and steel, and it has not tidied itself up for anybody. What it offers instead is a table in a cafe with a plate of meatballs, a staircase with a view at the top, and a Sunday morning on the river that the whole city turns out for.
It is also the only place in Belgium that feels like the start of somewhere else. Germany, the Netherlands and the Ardennes are all under an hour away, and the trains that run through here go a long way east.
Or make it a longer trip
These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.
Make it your trip
Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.
Common questions
- Is Liège worth visiting at all?
- It is the city in Belgium that visitors argue about, and the ones who dislike it usually saw it in two hours between trains. Give it two nights, eat in the old cafes, climb the staircase, and go on a Sunday. It has better food, lower prices and more character than several places with far better reputations.
- What is there beyond the city?
- Two things stand out. Fort de Loncin, a few kilometres out, was destroyed by a single shell in 1914 and remains a grave for the men inside it, which makes it the most affecting First World War site in this part of Belgium. Blegny Mine, twelve kilometres east, is on the UNESCO list and takes you underground in the original cage.
- How much French do I need?
- More than in Flanders. English is common among younger people and at the museums, less so in the cafes that are the reason to be here. Bonjour, s'il vous plaît and merci go a long way, and pointing at what the next table is eating works everywhere.
- Is the station really worth seeing?
- Yes. Guillemins has no front wall at all, just a 200 metre vault of white steel and glass over the platforms, and it changes completely with the weather and the hour. Arrive early for your train rather than on time.
- Can I do Aachen or Maastricht from here?
- Both, easily. Aachen is about 40 minutes by train and Maastricht half an hour, which makes Liège a practical base for a corner of Europe where three countries meet within an hour of each other.