Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium hold the country's most important collection of visual art, with more than 20,000 paintings, sculptures and drawings from the 15th to the 21st century. The institution traces its origins to 1801, when a museum of fine arts was founded in Brussels, and it opened to the public in 1803. Today it groups several museums under one roof on the edge of the Mont des Arts, together with the former studios of the painter Antoine Wiertz and the sculptor Constantin Meunier in Ixelles.

The Old Masters Museum is the heart of the collection and is strongest in Flemish painting. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, long attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, is one of the best-known pictures here, and a room devoted to Peter Paul Rubens holds more than twenty of his works. The Magritte Museum is devoted to the Belgian surrealist René Magritte, with works including The Empire of Light, The Return and Scheherazade. The Fin-de-Siècle Museum covers the decades around 1900, a period when Brussels was a centre of Art Nouveau and Symbolism, with works such as Toulouse-Lautrec's Divan Japonais.

Art lovers can easily spend most of a day here, but it is better to choose. Two to three hours lets you see the Old Masters highlights and either the Magritte or the Fin-de-Siècle galleries without tiring. The museums suit adults and older children; younger visitors often respond well to Magritte's playful images. The building is wheelchair accessible and has an adapted toilet.

Opening hours listed by Brussels Museums are 10:00 to 17:00 from Tuesday to Friday and 11:00 to 18:00 at weekends, with no Monday opening. The museums close on a handful of public holidays and close early on 24 and 31 December. Tickets can be bought online or at the ticket office, and the Brussels Card is accepted. Visitors under 18 get free entry on the first Wednesday afternoon of the month from 13:00.

The entrance is on Rue de la Régence, close to the Place Royale. The nearest railway station is Brussels-Central, metro lines 1 and 5 stop at Gare Centrale and Parc, and trams 92 and 93 run along the street. The Musical Instruments Museum, the Mont des Arts gardens and the Sablon are all within a few minutes' walk.