De Panne sits at the far western end of the Belgian coast, right on the French border, and it feels different from the other North Sea resorts. Where most Belgian beach towns have built up every inch of seafront, De Panne kept its dunes. A third of all the dunes in Belgium are here, 340 hectares of protected nature reserves that give the town its nickname: the green pearl of the coast.
The beaches are the widest in Belgium, stretching out seemingly forever at low tide. Behind the seafront promenade, the Dumont Quarter is a genuine architectural curiosity, an open-air museum of Belle Époque and Art Deco villas built in the early twentieth century. The Leopold I Esplanade marks the spot where the first King of Belgium set foot on his adopted country's soil in 1831.
Families know De Panne for Plopsaland, the amusement park just inland from the coast. But the real draw is the space. You can walk for hours through the dunes of the Westhoek Nature Reserve, where the landscape shifts between wind-sculpted sand valleys and dense scrubland, and emerge onto a beach with room to breathe. A short tram ride east, the Paul Delvaux Museum in Sint-Idesbald holds the finest collection of Belgium's great Surrealist painter, and the medieval ruins of Ten Duinen Abbey in Koksijde are among the most historically significant sites on this stretch of coast.