2 Best Sights in South of the Center, Antwerp and the Northeast

The Middelheim Open Air Sculpture Museum is a selfie wonderland, albeit of the more classical variety, with some 200 sculptures from artists including Jean Arp, Henry Moore, Rodin, and Ossip Zadkine spread across an attractive park and castle complex. Look up into the trees for bronze figures by the Spanish artist Juan Muňoz and in the Braem pavilion for smaller, more fragile sculptures.

Reopened in 2022 after more than a decade of extensive restoration work, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten) collection is studded with masterworks from Bruegel to Ensor, and is a must for any student of Flemish art. Paintings recovered from the French after the fall of Napoléon form the nucleus of a collection of 2,500 artworks. There are rooms devoted to Peter Paul Rubens and to Anthony van Dyck, and others focused almost entirely on Jacob Jordaens and Bruegel. The collection of Flemish Primitives includes works by Van Eyck, Memling, Roger van der Weyden, Joachim Patinir, and Quinten Metsys. On the first floor, there’s a representative survey of Belgian art of the past 150 years—Emile Claus, Rik Wouters, Permeke, Magritte, Delvaux, and especially James Ensor. Be sure to pick up a museum map as you enter, as the revamped layout is almost a building-within-a-building design---it's easy to lose your bearings inside the complex labyrinth of galleries.