Not to miss

Manneken Pis

A national symbol and known throughout the world, Manneken Pis - a little boy cheerfully taking a leak into a pool - never fails to disappoint visitors despite its diminutive size. It's three blocks from the Grand Place.

The present-day bronze Manneken Pis was sculpted by Jerôme Duquesnoy in 1619, but a stone version - named Little Julian - stood here from the mid-14th century. The statue's origins are lost in legend: some say he's modelled on a boy who extinguished a fire, others say he was a nobleman's son.

Whatever, the people of Brussels have adopted him as the symbol of their indomitable and irreverent spirit, and on occasion dress him up in one of his 700-odd costumes. Kitsch? Well, there's more - his little 'sister', Jeanneke Pis, squats in an alley on the north side of Grand Place, and Zinneke, a mongrel dog with cocked leg, stands in St Géry.

Musée Bruxellois de la Gueuze

Anyone with even a vague interest in Belgian beers must not miss a visit to the excellent Musée Bruxellois de la Gueuze. It's not so much a museum as a self-guided tour through the family-run Cantillon brewery, where the owners still proudly use traditional methods to make their strange lambic beers. After a brief introduction, make your own way around the ancient complex before returning to sample a beer or two.

Seventy years ago, 50 family-run breweries in and around Brussels made lambics. Today Cantillon is Brussels' sole survivor, although a handful of other breweries still operate in Lembeek and Beersel southwest of the capital.

Musée Magritte

A completely anonymous, suburban yellow-brick house: that's the façade of the Musée Magritte, and the façade that René Magritte, Belgium's most famous surrealist artist, showed the outside world. This museum in Jette occupies the house where Magritte and his wife Georgette lived from 1930 to 1954. Its appeal comes from its incredibly ordinary nature. It's odd to think the man responsible for some of the 20th century's most enduring images spent 24 years of his life in this bourgeois backstreet.

The museum opened in 1999 as the private initiative of a friend of the widow Magritte. With scandalously little support from the Belgian state, the curators assembled hundreds of original items - from Magritte's passport to paintings, photos, furniture and a pipe. Not everything's original - the piano in the salon is a copy - but there's more than enough to give an inkling into Magritte's private world. And fans will delight in discovering details of the house that Magritte faithfully reproduced in dozens of his famous paintings (many of which can be seen at the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts).