Across the border: Oostende and the Belgian coast

The Dutch coast is dunes, marram grass and a low line of buildings kept politely behind them. The Belgian coast is a wall of apartment towers standing directly on the sand. Sixty seven kilometres of it, almost continuously built. The first time you see it after years of the Dutch version, it is genuinely startling.

What it gets right

What Belgium does with that seafront is the part worth crossing the border for. Cafés and restaurants along the promenade serve proper hot meals all afternoon, at hours when a Dutch kitchen would tell you the chef starts at six. Mussels, shrimp croquettes, a plate of chips that takes itself seriously. The dressing cabins on the beach at Oostende look like they were carried over from another century, and are still in use.

The Kusttram runs the entire length of the coast, from the French border to the Dutch one, which makes it one of the longest tram lines in the world. It stops roughly every kilometre. You can get off at any resort, walk on the sand, and pick up the next one, which turns the whole coast into a single afternoon rather than a choice of one town.

Oostende itself

Oostende was the fashionable Belgian resort when Leopold II was building his seafront gallery, and it kept the scale even after the fashion moved on. James Ensor lived and painted here, and his masks are as strange in person as they look in reproduction. The harbour end near the station has the boats, the promenade has the crowd, and there is usually a busker somewhere in the middle willing to serenade a passing tour guide.

Getting there

Oostende is about three hours from Amsterdam by road, so as a day out it is a long one and works better as part of a Belgian leg with Bruges or Ghent, both of which are within an hour of it. If the point of the trip is the sea rather than the border, Scheveningen and Zandvoort are twenty minutes from The Hague and Haarlem respectively.

Ask about an excursion across the border