East Flanders museum tour

East Flanders has an exceptional museum landscape that extends far beyond central Ghent. This ambitious day trip — or, more comfortably, spread over a weekend — takes you to six museums that together show the full breadth of art, design and history. All six are accessible to wheelchair users thanks to lifts, ramps and adapted toilets.

Start in the Citadelpark with S.M.A.K. for contemporary art and the Design Museum Gent for applied arts and furniture design. Both have recently renewed access facilities, lifts to every floor and wheelchair loans at the desk. STAM (Ghent City Museum) tells the history of the city in the restored Bijloke monastery; the route through the museum is easily accessible, with a few small thresholds that can be negotiated with help. MIAT (now known as the Industry Museum) focuses on industrial heritage in a former cotton mill and is fully equipped for wheelchair visitors.

For those with more time, a detour to Oudenaarde is well worth it: the MOU Museum combines tapestries with silverware in the town hall and a neighbouring building, both reachable by lift. Round off the day at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle, an architectural gem with modernist art in a wooded setting on the Leie, fully wheelchair-accessible.

Practical tips: this route is ambitious for a single day — consider splitting it into "Ghent" and "outside Ghent". In Ghent the four museums are easily reachable by car or adapted public transport; you can find reduced-mobility car parks, among other places, at Bijloke and Citadelpark. Oudenaarde and Deurle require a car. Adapted toilets are available in all six museums. The museum cafés of STAM and Dhondt-Dhaenens have the most wheelchair-friendly terraces on the route.