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Bruges is the fairytale European city of your dreams: chocolate shops and cobblestone streets, canals filled with swans and, if you believe the hype, tourists elbow to elbow. It is considered Europe’s best preserved medieval town, But in 2018 visitor numbers reached a record high of 8.3 million.

Politicians beat the war drums, locals were up in arms and like Amsterdam and Venice, overtourism was the buzzword dominating headlines. In 2019, a five-year plan was developed to address the problem. Horsedrawn carriages add to the fairytale quality of Bruges.



Credit: Jan D’HondtMarkt Brugge Arriving by train five years (and one pandemic) later, I wanted to see whether overtourism is still an issue. Crossing the canal into the walled city on a chilly December morning, the streets are empty, save for locals biking along the cobblestones. I check into my three-star hotel, one of a number of smaller, owner-operator hotels thriving thanks to a 2002 decision by the city to ban vacation homes.

The ban is part of Bruges’s long-term strategy to manage tourism, along with no longer promoting in-and-out cruise ship tours and limiting how many ships that can dock on any given day in the nearby port of Zeebruge. The 2019-2024 mitigation measures haven’t meant locking the city gates: it’s about making Bruges a better place for both locals and visitors. And yet, the first local I speak to isn’t happy.

His shop sells designer vintage clothes, mid-century ceramics and features an art gal.

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