Antwerp's Begijnhof is a small enclosed beguinage tucked behind ordinary city streets, with brick houses, a chapel and a calm garden at its centre. It once housed beguines, religious women who lived in community without taking full monastic vows, a distinctive urban institution in the Low Countries.
The pleasure is in the sudden quiet. Step in from the surrounding streets and the city seems to drop away: cobbles, garden paths, old facades and a sense of domestic religious life rather than monumental church power. It is an easy and worthwhile pause between Antwerp's larger museums and shopping streets.