Bois de la Cambre — Brussels' Green Lung by the Sonian Forest

Bois de la Cambre — known in Dutch as Ter Kamerenbos — is a 123-hectare public park at the southern tip of Brussels' Ixelles commune, forming the northernmost gateway to the vast Sonian Forest. Until the 1860s, it was simply another section of that ancient beech woodland, which once stretched unbroken across a large swath of the Belgian plateau and had served as a royal hunting ground since the Middle Ages. The park was detached from the Sonian Forest by the City of Brussels in 1862 and redesigned in the fashionable English landscape style under the direction of the city's landscape department, inspired by the naturalistic parks then sweeping through London and Paris. By 1864 it was formally opened to the public, giving the rapidly expanding bourgeois neighbourhoods of Ixelles and Uccle their defining recreational space.

The centrepiece of the park is its man-made lake, measuring roughly 200 metres across, at whose centre sits a small wooded island called the Île Robinson. The island, named after the literary castaway Robinson Crusoe, is reached by flat-bottomed rowboats that visitors can hire from the lakeside — a tradition that has persisted essentially unchanged since the park's Victorian inauguration. A wooden chalet-style restaurant operates on the island itself, a beloved seasonal institution. Surrounding the lake, a network of broad, tree-lined promenades — some still carrying vehicle traffic on weekend mornings — winds through stands of plane trees, oaks, and the tall copper beeches characteristic of the adjacent Sonian woodland.

Throughout the 20th century, the park became the stage for one of Brussels' most persistent civic debates: the tension between car traffic and pedestrian use. For decades the ring road skirting the park was open to through traffic, and the fight to pedestrianise it on weekends became a landmark cause for Brussels' early environmental movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Today large sections are closed to cars on Sunday mornings, when cyclists, joggers, inline skaters, and families reclaim the wide asphalt loops in a weekly ritual that feels deeply embedded in Bruxellois identity. The park also serves as the traditional route of the Brussels 20 km race, one of Belgium's largest mass-participation running events held each May.

Visitors who come on a weekday will find a quieter, more contemplative version of the park — ideal for long walks into the beech allées, a coffee at one of the lakeside terraces, or an hour in a rented rowboat drifting toward the Île Robinson. The park is most spectacular in mid-October when the copper beeches turn rust and gold, and again in May when chestnut candles bloom along the main promenades. Tram line 8 connects the park directly to central Brussels in under 20 minutes, stopping at the Legrand/Cambre stop on the park's northern edge.