The Stadhuis (town hall) on the Grote Markt is one of the oldest surviving in Flanders, with a sandstone Renaissance facade from the 1590s grafted onto an earlier medieval core. The attached Belfry — a slender square brick tower with a stone lantern on top — was inscribed on UNESCO's list of Belfries of Belgium and France in 1999, part of a network of 56 belfries that recall the era of independent Flemish communes.
The interior is open to visitors when the council is not sitting. Look for the leather-clad council chamber, hung with seventeenth-century Cordoba leather wall coverings (one of the few rooms of its kind to survive in northern Europe), and the small set of paintings showing the medieval town. Carillon recitals from the belfry on summer evenings.