Easter falls early in 2027: Easter Sunday is 28 March and Easter Monday, a public holiday in Belgium, is 29 March. Antwerp has no Easter market, whatever the 2023 version of this guide claimed; it does have four Rubens paintings in its cathedral, one of them away for restoration, the printing house of the family who paid for that one, a zoo that opened in 1843, and more shared bikes per head than any other city in Europe. Here is how to spend the long weekend.

1. Rubens at the cathedral

The Cathedral of Our Lady on the Groenplaats holds four large works by Peter Paul Rubens, and two of them tell the Easter story. The Raising of the Cross, painted in 1610 and 1611 for the parishioners of the church of St Walpurga, which was demolished in the early 18th century, is the only one not made for the cathedral; its central panel is 4.6 metres high, and the contract of June 1610 paid 2,600 florins. The Descent from the Cross was commissioned by the arquebusiers’ guild, with a contract signed on 7 September 1611 and the guild’s president, Rubens’s friend Nicolaas Rockox, involved. Its central panel was ready about a year later and the wings, the Visitation and the Presentation in the Temple, by 1614.

Holy Week is the right week to see them: they are altarpieces painted for churches, and Easter is the feast whose story they tell. Of the other two Rubens works in the building, the Assumption of the Virgin has stood on the high altar since 1626.

2. The Resurrection that is away

The Rubens most closely tied to Easter will not be there. His Resurrection of Christ, the first work he made for the cathedral, is an epitaph triptych painted on site in 1611 and 1612 for Martina Plantin, widow of the printer Jan Moretus, to hang above her husband’s grave in the second chapel. It is small by Rubens’s standards, with a central panel of 138 by 98 centimetres, and flanked by John the Baptist and Saint Martina, patron saints of the two families. In January 2026 the Flemish government announced a restoration: the panels have cracked and the paint has come loose. The cathedral confirms the epitaph triptych is not currently on display, and it is expected to be away for two years, with a photographic print in its place. “I am delighted that this triptych is being thoroughly restored,” said the Flemish culture minister, Caroline Gennez. The Flemish government pays 80 per cent; the Friends of the Cathedral fund at the King Baudouin Foundation pays the rest.

3. The family who paid for it

The printing house of the Plantin and Moretus families still stands on the Vrijdagmarkt as the Museum Plantin-Moretus. Christophe Plantin founded the business in the 16th century; after his death it passed to his son-in-law, Jan Moretus. The museum keeps the two oldest surviving printing presses in the world, and the whole house, workshops and museum complex was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2005, four years after its archives joined the Memory of the World register. That is the correction to the earlier claim on this page: Antwerp’s old town as a whole is not a World Heritage site, but this house is.

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4. The zoo by the station

ZOO Antwerpen opened on 21 July 1843, which makes it the oldest animal park in Belgium. It has been run since its founding by the Royal Zoological Society of Antwerp, the KMDA, and its first director was the zoologist Jacques Kets. It holds about 5,000 animals of some 950 species, on a site that grew in its early years from under 1.6 hectares to more than 10.5. The buildings are part of the visit: an Egyptian temple of 1856, a Moorish temple of 1885 that now houses okapis, a winter garden of 1897 and an aquarium of 1910. Since 1 January 1983 the whole park, buildings and garden, has been a protected monument.

5. By shared bike

The way between all three is by Velo, the city’s bike-share. It started in 2011 with 1,000 bikes and now has 4,460 at 320 stations; in 2024 they were ridden a record 7,168,640 times, and about 12 per cent of the city’s population has a subscription. Relative to population, Antwerp ranks first in Europe for bikes, rides and users. The repair shop runs seven days a week with about 60 staff. “Velo and Antwerp have been the perfect tandem for 14 years,” said Koen Kennis, the alderman for mobility, in February 2025. The current operator’s contract runs until 2027, and the city has said it will put the system out to tender again.

Easter Monday is a holiday; the Rubens paintings, four centuries old, have seen a few.