During WWI (1914–18), historic Ypres (pronounced 'eepr'; Ieper in Dutch) was bombarded into oblivion while futile battles raged between trench networks in the surrounding poppy fields. Today, many medieval buildings have been meticulously rebuilt and the battlefields in Ypres' rolling agricultural hinterland (called the Ypres Salient) are a moving reminder of the horrors of war, with their seemingly endless graveyards and memorials.
Grote MarktSQUARE
The brilliantly rebuilt Lakenhallen, a vast Gothic edifice originally serving as the 13th-century cloth market, dominates this very photogenic central square. It sports a 70m-high belfry, reminiscent of London's Big Ben, and hosts the gripping museum In Flanders Fields , a multimedia WWI experience honouring ordinary people's experiences of wartime horrors. The ticket allows free entry to three other minor city museums.
Menin GateMEMORIAL
A block east of Grote Markt, the famous Menin Gate is a huge stone gateway straddling the main road at the city moat. It's inscribed with the names of 54,896 'lost' British and Commonwealth WWI troops whose bodies were never found.
Ypres Salient
Many WWI sites are in rural locations that are awkward to reach without a car or tour bus. But the following are all within 600m of Ypres–Roeselare bus routes 94 and 95 (once or twice hourly weekdays, five daily weekends), so could be visited en route between Ypres and Bruges.
Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917MUSEUM
In central Zonnebeke village, Kasteel Zonnebeke (www.zonnebeke.be) is a lake-fronted Normandy chalet-style mansion built in 1922 to replace a castle bombarded into rubble during WWI. It now hosts a tourist office, cafe and a particularly polished WWI museum charting local battle progressions with plenty of multilingual commentaries. The big attraction here is descending into its multiroom ‘trench experience’ with low-lit, wooden-clad subterranean bunk rooms and a soundtrack to add wartime atmosphere. Entirely indoors, explanations are much more helpful here than in ‘real’ trenches elsewhere.
Tyne CotCEMETERY
Probably the most visited Salient site, this is the world’s biggest British Commonwealth war cemetery, with 11,956 graves. A huge semicircular wall commemorates another 34,857 lost-in-action soldiers whose names wouldn’t fit on Ypres’ Menin Gate. The name Tyne Cot was coined by Northumberland fusiliers who fancied that German bunkers on the hillside here looked like Tyneside cottages. Two such dumpy concrete bunkers sit amid the graves, with a third partly visible through the metal wreath beneath the central white Cross of Sacrifice.
Deutscher SoldatenfriedhofCEMETERY
The area’s main German WWI cemetery is smaller than Tyne Cot but arguably more memorable, amid oak trees and trios of squat, mossy crosses. Some 44,000 corpses were grouped together here, up to 10 per granite grave slab, and four eerie silhouette statues survey the site. Entering takes you through a black concrete ‘tunnel’ that clanks and hisses with distant war sounds, while four short video montages commemorate the tragedy of war. It's beyond the northern edge of Langemark on bus route 95.
BUS
Services pick up passengers in Grote Markt's northeast corner (check the direction carefully!). For Bruges take Roeselare-bound routes 94 or 95 then change to train.
TRAIN
Services run hourly to Ghent (€11.50, one hour) and Brussels (€17.50, 1¾ hours) via Kortrijk (€5.30, 30 minutes), where you could change for Bruges or Antwerp.
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