1,470 companies and more than 3,300 people trade diamonds in three streets beside Central Station. What the district is, how the trade is doing, and whether the stones are cheaper here.
Category: 🛍️ Shopping
Whether you’re in the mood for high-end fashion or one-of-a-kind vintage shopping, we have you covered. Explore Antwerp’s unique boutiques, markets, and more.
The Chocolate Line: Dominique Persoone’s kitchen in Napoleon’s palace
Dominique Persoone opened The Chocolate Line in the Paleis op de Meir in 2010. The pralines are made in the palace’s 18th-century kitchen, in full view of the till.
Boutique shopping in Antwerp, forty years after the Six
Geert Bruloot opened Louis in 1986, the year the Antwerp Six showed in London. Ten designer and independent shops worth the walk now, checked address by address.
Kloosterstraat: Antwerp’s antiques street, built beside a lost abbey
The Kloosterstraat takes its name from St Michael’s Abbey, founded in 1124 and demolished in 1831. Its traders now list 76 addresses, from a record shop with 100,000 singles to a sixteenth-century town house.
CronopiO: a bookshop on the Zuid named after Cortázar’s creatures
CronopiO, at Kasteelpleinstraat 21, sells books in Dutch, English, Spanish and French and pours coffee and wine. Its name comes from a writer born in Brussels in 1914.
De Groene Waterman: the Wolstraat bookshop its readers own
De Groene Waterman has sold literary and left-wing books at Wolstraat 7 since 1968. It is a cooperative, and in June 2025 Dua Lipa made it her first bookshop of the month.
Luddites Books & Wine: the Antwerp bookshop that pays you to stay
Richard Bolte and Jorien Caers opened Luddites in a 1902 townhouse on Hopland in March 2020. Buy a book downstairs and the first glass of wine upstairs is half price.
Antwerp’s Meir is getting the world’s largest Zara and a new floor
The Meir has been car-free since 1993 and draws more than 1.4 million visitors a month. Zara is building its largest shop in the world on the corner, and the city plans to relay the street from facade to facade, starting in 2028 at the earliest.