Brussels

About Brussels

Brussels is a region in its own right — one of the three that make up federal Belgium — and not a city in the ordinary sense. Nineteen municipalities, each with its own mayor and council, sit inside 162 km² enclaved within Flanders, and the whole is officially bilingual in French and Dutch. The City of Brussels is only one of those nineteen; the region is what this page describes, and on 1 January 2026 it counted 1,255,834 inhabitants, a figure that barely moved during 2025 as internal migration to the other two regions cancelled out births and arrivals from abroad.

Its landmark is the Grand-Place, the guildhall square rebuilt after the French bombardment of 1695 and inscribed by UNESCO in 1998; the Town Hall's tower, the Maison du Roi and the surrounding guild houses are what most visitors come for, along with the Manneken Pis a few streets away, the Art Nouveau houses Victor Horta built here in the 1890s, and the Atomium left over from the 1958 World's Fair. The city is the capital of comics as well: the Belgian Comic Strip Center occupies a Horta warehouse, and murals of Tintin and Le Chat are painted across the inner-city walls.

What Brussels lives off is administration. The European Commission and Council, most of the European Parliament's work, NATO headquarters and the Benelux secretariat are all here, and with them thousands of lobbying offices, law firms, embassies and trade associations — the European Quarter around Schuman is effectively a second city centre. Beyond that, the region runs on services, finance and tourism, and it is one of the richest regions in the EU by output per head while also carrying Belgium's highest unemployment.

Politics here is slow by design and sometimes slower in practice: after the June 2024 regional election the government took more than 600 days to form, and Boris Dilliès (MR) was only sworn in as Minister-President on 14 February 2026. In August the Grand-Place is covered by the Flower Carpet, in September the same square fills with brewers for the Belgian Beer Weekend, and the rest of the year the squares belong to markets.

rules.city collects practical civic information for Brussels, verified against official sources, including rules, fees, transport and local services.