EZTrip.com International Destination Guide and Hotel Listings

The best place to start exploring is at the mainly Gothic St Baaf's Cathedral , squeezed into the corner of St Baafsplein (daily: April-Oct 8.30am-6pm, Nov-March 8.30am-5pm; free). Inside, a small chapel (April-Oct Mon-Sat 9.30am-5pm, Sun 1-6pm; Nov-March Mon-Sat 10.30am-4pm, Sun 2-5pm; ¬2.50 includes the crypt) holds Ghent's greatest treasure, the altarpiece of the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb , an early fifteenth-century work believed to be by Jan van Eyck. The cover screens display an Annunciation scene with the archangel Gabriel's wings reaching up to the timbered ceiling of a Flemish house; on the inside - only revealed when the shutters were opened on Sundays and feast days - the upper level shows God the Father, the Virgin and John the Baptist, while in the lower panel is the Lamb, approached by various figures in paradise, seen as a sort of idealized Low Countries - look closely and you can see the cathedrals of Bruges, Utrecht and Maastricht. The twelfth-century crypt (same times) preserves features of the earlier Romanesque church of St John, along with murals painted between 1480 and 1540.

Just west of St Baaf's, the fifteenth-century Lakenhalle (Cloth Hall) is little more than an empty shell, whose first-floor entrance leads to the adjoining Belfry (tours daily; ¬2.50), a much-amended edifice from the fourteenth century. A glass-sided lift climbs up to the roof for excellent views over the city centre. A few strides away to the north is the Stadhuis (tours May-Oct Mon-Thurs 3pm; ¬2.50), whose long facade was erected in two phases - the earlier and more flamboyant section was designed by Rombout Keldermans. Each ornate niche was intended to hold a statuette, but the money ran out; the present carvings, representing the powerful and famous - including Keldermans himself rubbing his chin and studying his plans for the building - were only inserted at the end of the last century.

A couple of minutes' walk from the Stadhuis, Korenlei forms the western side of the old city harbour, home to a series of expansive, high-gabled merchants' houses dating from the eighteenth century. In architectural contrast, the Graslei , opposite, holds the squat, gabled guild- and warehouses of the town's medieval boatmen and grain-weighers. A few minutes north of here is the sinister-looking 's Gravensteen (daily: April-Sept 9am-6pm, Oct-March 9am-5pm, last ticket 45 minutes before closing; ¬5) or Castle of the Counts, whose interior holds an assembly room with a magnificent stone fireplace and a gruesome collection of torture instruments. North of here, Braderijstraat leads to Lievekaai , Ghent's second oldest harbour, while east of the castle are the part-gentrified, seventeenth-century lanes and alleys of the Patershol , home to the Huis van Alijn Volkskunde , Kraanlei 65 (Tues-Sun 9am-12.30pm & 1.30-5.30pm; ¬2.50; www.aijn.gent.be ), a series of restored almshouses where a delightful chain of period rooms depicts local life and work in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

South of the centre, Ghent's main shopping street, Veldstraat , heads off towards the impressive Museum voor Schone Kunsten , fifteen minutes' walk away at Nicolaas de Liemaeckereplein 3, Citadelpark (Tues-Sun 9.30am-5pm; ¬2.50; www.finearts.museum.gent.be ). Here, there's a first-rate sample of old masters including Bosch's Carrying of the Cross and the smaller, less well-known St Jerome at Prayer , along with work by Pieter Bruegel the Younger, Jordaens, Van Dyck and Frans Hals. Opposite, the old casino has been turned into SMAK (Tues-Sun 10am-6pm; ¬5; www.smak.be ), a museum of contemporary art, which illustrates every major artistic movement since 1945.