How to do a Self Guided Brussels Street Art Tour in Under 2 Hours

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September 16, 2017

My husband and I headed to Brussels for the sole purpose of seeing our friends Samet, Maria, and their baby girl. I had zero expectations for the city of Brussels and only had the goal of eating fries and drinking beer (of which I did plenty).

Both my husband and my friend Samet proclaimed, “Brussels is an ugly city,” so I was not so excited to see it, especially after having spent the week in picturesque Amsterdam and a day in Bruges.

However, after a few days of spending maybe one too many hours at Delirium Café (a place with over 2,000 beers – winning the Guinness world book record for most beers in 2004), I decided to see more of the supposedly ugly city of Brussels.

What better way to see an otherwise unaesthetically pleasing city than to see it’s street art?

I was, of course, in luck. To dress up some of the drab areas of the city, the city government commissioned numerous graffiti artists to add some color to Brussels. There are several guided tours one can take to see Brussel’s Street Art and Comic Mural Scene (see list below). If you want to learn about the art, the artists, and the history of comics in Belgium, then it may be worth it.

However, we decided to go for free, and we used Google Maps to walk about 2 to 3 hours around Brussels, seeing some of its Comic Strip Mural art, which was actually pretty cool. It’s a structured self-guided tour to some cool murals. However, you’ll need to venture a bit more off the beaten track to see Belgium’s most famous comic mural: Tintin. You can also opt to visit a tourist center in Belgium and pay 1 Euro to get a map of where all the comics are located. Or, of course, you can take a guided tour.

Brussels and, in fact, Belgium, love their comics. In the city of Brussels and slightly outside, there are over 50 comic murals to be seen. As a country, the unique Belgian comics can claim an important role (alongside France) in developing European comics as we know them today. If you are particularly in love with comics, there’s even a Comics Art Museum open most days during normal business hours.

The self-guided graffiti comic mural walking tour we took did not have every mural, but it was definitely a fun thing to do.

Luckily, while walking in Brussels, I slowly started to see it’s beauty and disagree with my husband’s and friend’s idea that Brussels is categorically the ugliest city. My husband, however, still holds the same opinion.

You can also take the same self-guided tour by following this map.

My pictures of the tour are below:

For a more detailed look into the Comic Strip, Mural Trail visits the VisitBrussels website, where they have a detailed description of every comic strip, it’s location, and information about it’s significance to comics. You should also check out Backpacksandbunkbeds who a self-guided comic mural tour that discussed additional information.

Brussels Street Art Tour Options: