Things to do in Belgium

A cooling tower rests next to steel company Carsid's mothballed power plant.

Four concrete cooling towers flank the former Beringen mine power plant, the only preserved mine cooling towers in the Limburg mining region.

Flemish workers flocked to Mouscron during the interwar to work in textile factories. The city, therefore, had to pull out all the stops to cope with the growing population.

Today, you won't find anything of the Pelican Bridge, a steel bridge kept in place with thousands of rivets across the Veurnevaart in Nieuwpoort.

For almost a century, the Veuve Van Enschodt bridge over the Rupel was the only connection between the Antwerp municipalities of Klein Willebroek and Boom.

As if the Atlantic Wall defensive strongholds in the Ostend dunes were not enough, Nazi Germany erected a second line of defence in the hinterland.

Trains have been thundering over the Vierendeel bridge in Grammene between Deinze and De Panne for over a century.

The dunes of Raversijde, a seaside resort west of East, are home to not one but two German bunker complexes.

Today, no trains run along the former railway line 109 between Mons and Chimay, but historic steam locomotives and diesel and electric railways of the local railways in Belgium do.

On Christmas Eve 1944, disaster struck Kalken when a V1 bomb hit the Vaart canal in Kalken at 4 pm.