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Ghent was one of the largest cities in northern Europe in the year 1300, a cloth-trading giant with 50,000 inhabitants at a time when London had fewer. Then the textile trade collapsed, and the city spent several centuries in genteel decline. The irony is that the decline saved it -- Ghent never had the money to tear itself down and rebuild, which is why you can still walk along the Graslei waterfront and look at intact medieval guild houses reflected in the Leie river. The Gravensteen castle, built in 1180, squats in the middle of the city like it has always been there, because it has.

The thing that distinguishes Ghent from the obvious Belgian tourist circuit is that people actually live here.

It is a university city -- the University of Ghent brings 44,000 students -- and the streets around Sint-Pietersplein and Overpoort are unmistakably young and alive. The Gentse Feesten, ten days of street music and theater every July, draws over a million visitors. The rest of the year, local life clusters around the Vrijdagmarkt and the cafes of the Patershol neighborhood, the medieval quarter of crooked lanes where the city's best restaurants have quietly colonized the old tanners' district. Cuberdons, those purple cone-shaped jellies sold from carts near the Groentenmarkt, are the kind of thing only locals would defend and visitors will eat three of before admitting they liked them.