Museums near Fort Napoleon

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The room where Queen Louise-Marie died on 11 October 1850: furnished as it was then, and the bed in it is in all likelihood her deathbed. The house at Langestraat 69, built between 1770 and 1780 and rented by the royal couple from 1834. The halls of the fishery, the port and shipping; posters, papers and photographs of the resort. The temporary exhibitions are made by the De Plate local-history society, which works in the same house.

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The Blue Salon with a full-scale copy of The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889, hung where the original hung; the original itself has been at the Getty since 1987. The shell-and-souvenir shop on the ground floor — the trade of the artist’s aunt and uncle, which he closed but did not clear out. The studio and the living rooms with what furniture survived. Five experience rooms, each on its own theme: Ensor’s world, interiors, his public life, the criticism, masks and strange figures. An exhibition space in the annexed house, where the shows are made with Xavier Tricot.

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The ship herself, of 1932: fifteen sails of 1,600 square metres in all, the deck, the cadets’ quarters, the officers’ cabins, the chart room. The ship’s operating room, which served as a mortuary chapel when the Mercator carried the remains of Father Damien from New Zealand to Antwerp in 1936. The memory of the seventh voyage of 1934–1935, from which she brought back the Franco-Belgian Easter Island expedition and two moai.

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The museum’s own building on Romestraat has been closed for rebuilding since January 2025 and reopens in 2028; the collection is shown in parts in the Venetian Galleries, so the whole of it cannot be seen at present. The Léon Spilliaert holding — the Ostend seafront and dyke, the night self-portraits; nothing matches it anywhere, and at its core stands Self-portrait with Red Pencil of 1908, Indian ink, gouache and pastel on paper, 85 × 69 cm, inv. SM000005. James Ensor and the circle of Les XX (Willy Finch). Constant Permeke, Jean Brusselmans, Frits Van den Berghe — Flemish expressionism. Paul Delvaux, Georges Vantongerloo, Roger Raveel, Luc Tuymans. The oldest work is François Bossuet’s The Sawmills at Slijkens near Ostend, 1821.

The planetarium dome and the sky shows. The space-flight section. There are no objects of a museum kind.

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The Aachen battery — begun on 8 January 1915 and in service by the end of that April: the observation post, the gun positions, the communication trenches. The Saltzwedel-neu battery of the Second World War — more than sixty bunkers and underground galleries. Everything has been kept where it stands: nothing was carted in.