In April 2022 the ports of Antwerp and Zeebrugge signed the agreement that made them one company, Port of Antwerp-Bruges, which calls itself the second largest port in Europe. In 2025 it handled 266.5 million tonnes of cargo by sea, 4.1 per cent less than the year before, in a year of geopolitical tension and strikes. Container traffic still grew, by 0.7 per cent measured in boxes, and the United States became its largest trading partner, with 31.3 million tonnes. Rotterdam, the one port in Europe that is bigger, handled 428.4 million tonnes in the same year.

From Napoleon’s dock to the Dutch border

The modern port began with an order from Napoleon. In 1811 he had Antwerp’s first lock and dock dug, the Bonaparte Dock; the Willem Dock followed in 1813. Both still sit on the Eilandje, north of the old town. The Kattendijk Dock was finished in 1860, and three years later, with British support, the Belgian government bought off the toll the Dutch had charged on the Scheldt, the river that connects Antwerp with the North Sea. From then on the port moved north along the right bank, dock by dock, until the Grote Doorsteek project took the docklands to the Dutch border.

In the 1960s the port crossed the river: work on the Waasland port, on the left bank, began in that decade, and on the Kallo lock in 1979. In 1989 the Berendrecht lock opened on the right bank as the largest shipping lock in the world. The first terminal on the Deurganck Dock, on the left bank, opened on 6 July 2005. The estuary is deep enough for ships of more than 100,000 gross tonnes to reach 80 kilometres inland.

The Kieldrecht lock is the newest of the big ones. It took from October 2011 to April 2015 to build, cost €340 million, half of it lent by the European Investment Bank, and was opened by King Philippe on 10 June 2016, two months late after water damaged a technical room. It is 500 metres long and 68 metres wide, the same as Berendrecht, but its floor lies deeper, at 17.8 metres below the Belgian reference level. Measured by volume of water, it is the largest lock in the world.

Who runs it

The port is home to more than 1,400 companies and around 164,000 direct and indirect jobs, and it adds some €21 billion to the Belgian economy, about 4.5 per cent of national output by the port’s own count in 2022. It is also the second-largest petrochemical cluster in the world. In the first half of 2026 it took in 9,773 seagoing ships, 77 cruise ships and 1.8 million cars, and handled 133.9 million tonnes in total, 74.2 million of them in 6.8 million containers.

Since June 2026 the chief executive has been Rob Smeets, appointed for six years after Jacques Vandermeiren announced on 14 April that he would step down. Smeets has worked for the Port Authority for more than 20 years: he ran the towage department from 2014, became director of nautical operations in 2017 and chief operations officer in 2019. “Rob knows the Port Authority and the port like no one else,” said Johan Klaps, who chairs the board.

The Port Authority works from the Port House at Zaha Hadidplein 1, which opened in September 2016, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects: a faceted glass volume set on top of a derelict fire station, which was kept and restored underneath. It is 46 metres tall, with 12,800 square metres of floor space, 6,200 of them new, and it brought together 500 staff who had worked in separate buildings around the city. The Port House by Zaha Hadid has its own guided tours, which the port books through its events site.

How to see it

Flandria runs the public harbour tours from the Asiadok-Zuidkaai: its Port of Antwerp cruise takes two or three hours, from €23 a person, through the docks and onto the Scheldt, past the terminals and close to the largest ships. The Oosterweel Cruise takes three hours from €28, and a two-hour pancake boat costs from €32.50. The boat is the right way in, because the port is a place of docks and terminals, and only the boat goes into them.

On land, two museums tell the history. The roof of the MAS, the city museum in a stacked tower, is free and looks out over the docks; its Vracht floor tells the story of the port, its workers and its cargo. The Red Star Line Museum opened on 28 September 2013 in the warehouses of the shipping line that carried about two million passengers from Antwerp to North America between 1873 and 1934. Albert Einstein travelled with it more than once, and Irving Berlin emigrated on it at the age of five.

The port starts at a dock Napoleon ordered in 1811. For now, it ends at the Dutch border.