Wander & Wonder Travel Newsletter

Hey StoryHunter

While Bruges often gets all the postcards, Ghent gets all the students.

Ghent has all the same medieval ingredients as its famous neighbour - the canals, the guild houses, the towers - but with 65,000 students living in the middle of it, nothing here has turned into a museum piece.

And in August, the city gets even better.

From 14-16 August, the medieval quarter throws its own street party - the oldest, narrowest, most atmospheric corner of Ghent is being turned into three days of food and music.

But don’t let your guard down in this city; it’s a weird place where your shoes are being hold hostage and where beer can start an uprising.

Read on to learn about:

🏰 The castle stormed over the price of beer

🖼️ The world's most stolen painting

👟 The bar that holds your shoe hostage

Explore with the new StoryHunt app

Now you can get tailored tours anywhere in the world 🌍

We've launched the new StoryHunt app, and we're so excited for you to try it!

It has a lot more features, a cool interactive map, and everything you need to explore the world in a new, exciting way.

Destination of the Week

Ghent is a place of stubborn people.

To this day, they still proudly call themselves stroppendragers - "noose bearers".

It all started when an uprising in the Middle Ages ended with the citizens being forced to wear hangman’s nooses around their necks as a kind of punishment.

And you can still feel that rebellious spirit in the streets.

At one moment, you can stand on St Michael's Bridge and get the famous view of three great towers lined up in a row.

The next moment, you can duck into Werregarenstraat, a narrow alley where graffiti is completely legal and the walls are repainted so often that the city never looks the same twice.

It’s a city that’s medieval on the outside and unruly on the inside.

Don't Miss

Right in the middle of town, surrounded by a moat, stands Gravensteen - the Castle of the Counts, and the only fully preserved moated castle in Flanders.

It was built in 1180, it has 24 towers, thick stone walls and a genuinely grim past as a court, a prison and a torture chamber.

But the best story about this castle is not medieval at all.

In 1949, 138 students stormed it - because the government had raised the price of a beer from 3 francs to 4.

They locked the guard in a closet, hung banners from the battlements and pelted the police with overripe fruit and smoke bombs.

The people of Ghent were so delighted that not a single student was prosecuted – and the beer stayed at 4 francs.

Did You Know?

Inside St Bavo's Cathedral hangs a painting with a truly absurd criminal record.

The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb is one of the most important paintings ever made - and the most stolen artwork in history.

Over six centuries it has been nearly burned by rioters, taken by Napoleon, and looted by the Nazis.

And then there is the panel that never came home.

In 1934, thieves removed the panel from the cathedral. A ransom note demanded one million Belgian francs. The government refused to pay.

The thief returned half of the stolen panel as a gesture of good faith - by leaving it in the left-luggage office at Ghent train station.

The other half has never been found.

The Trendy Traveler Tip

On the Vrijdagmarkt square you will find Dulle Griet, which is a dark, cluttered old bar with more than 500 Belgian beers on the list.

And when you order the house beer, something unusual happens.

It arrives in a 1.2-litre glass balanced in a wooden stand - and before you get it, you have to hand over one of your shoes.

It goes into a basket that is hoisted up to the ceiling, where it hangs among everyone else’s footwear until you return the glass in one piece.

The reason is delightfully practical: people kept walking out with the glasses.

Nobody, apparently, walks out with one shoe.