The Château de Beloeil estate, the Belgian Versailles

The castle

This stunning building was from the 14th century the residence of the Princes de Ligne, one of the oldest Belgian noble families. The recently restored interior of the castle houses a rare collection of paintings from the 15th to the 19th centuries and an outstanding library of more than 20,000 books (from the invention of the printing press to the modern days). Look closely at the antique furniture, an elegant sample of work by the best French cabinet workers of the 17th and 18th century. The paintings mostly stage the family members having lived in the castle, thus retracing important chapters of their life.

The gardens

The carefully maintained formal gardens, which extend for more than 25 hectares, reflect the changing idiosyncratic tastes of the nobility over the years. The boulingrin – a corruption of the English phrase bowling green – is a wide area of grass once used for games and theatrical productions written by the Princes of the 17th century and close by the Rieu d’Amour is a small folly of half-buried Greek columns created by Prince Charles-Joseph in the 18th century.