Parks & Rides

With somewhat heavy hearts, many of us, on the occasion of All Souls' Day, survey the linear alleys of the Brussels cemeteries, with a chrysanthemum, a shovel and a bottle of water in our hands. But very often, we don't linger there. However some of our cemeteries deserve it, if only because of the atmosphere of contemplation and completeness that we can feel there.

This is the case with the little Woluwé-Saint-Lambert Cemetery, not far from Tomberg. No famous tomb, no remarkable monument, but birdsong, "public benches" around flower beds, a kind of little public park, all in all, where for a while, one would see children playing with their marbles.

Laeken

Of a quite different order is Laeken Cemetery, the only Brussels cemetery that is still deployed around a parish church (others having been driven back, for lack of room and "rejection" of the dead, outside the city), that which one can readily call the "little Père-Lachaise". As romantic as one could wish, monuments of the notable, and tombs of the famous (Fernand Khnopff, Michel de Ghelderode, Joseph Poelaert...), it's not surprising that it is regularly visited by tourists and by home-grown inhabitants of Brussels, or that people occasionally tell each other cock-and-bull stories there at nightfall... Also on view, an original version of Auguste Rodin's The Thinker.

Ixelles

The Ixelles Cemetery is a little bit like Laeken Cemetery and is therefore also worth being looked at. There too, some famous people have ordered their plot of land there, such as Victor Horta, Ernest Solvay and Frederic Neuhaus. In 1891, the former French Minister of War, George Boulanger, even committed suicide there, inconsolably heartbroken, on the tomb of his mistress.

Dieweg

And then, we cannot fail to mention the marvellous Dieweg Cemetery, where burials are no longer a matter of course. Abandoned in 1958, the tombs have become overgrown, which imbues the place today with a superbly romantic atmosphere. Matthieu Lethé