Data for Brussels, Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp, installed before you fly. Belgium is on the Europe plan, so the same eSIM carries on to Amsterdam, Paris, Cologne and London by train. The fries, regrettably, do not travel as well.
The Belgium plan covers Belgium only.
The same 10 GB in a package that keeps working past Belgium.
38 other countries share the package with Belgium. A few of them:
What's included, when it starts, and how to get connected.
Brussels Airport’s station is under the terminal, and Brussels-Central is about 17 minutes away. Every ticket to or from it carries the Brussels Airport supplement, the old Diabolo fee: about €7 in 2025 and the same for everyone, discount or not. Flying in to ‘Brussels South’? That is Charleroi, 46 km away: bus A to Charleroi-Sud station, then about an hour on the train.
The whole Brussels region is a low-emission zone, and so are Antwerp and central Ghent. Cars with foreign plates must be registered, free and online, before they enter Brussels (Dutch plates excepted) or Ghent. Since 1 January 2026 Euro 5 diesels are banned in Brussels: a warning first, then a €350 fine. The speed limit in most of the city is 30 km/h, too.
Brussels’ most famous statue is a bronze boy just over half a metre high, and the crowd in front of him is mostly people saying so. The one on the corner has been a replica since 1965; the original is in the City Museum on the Grand-Place. He owns around a thousand costumes and changes several times a week, on a published schedule.
Bruges has about 120,000 residents and some eight million visitors a year, and by noon the centre feels it. Ghent, under an hour away on the same line, has the Van Eyck altarpiece, a castle in the middle of town, a university and 270,000 people who actually live there, so the bars stay open after the tour groups leave. Sleep in Ghent; see Bruges early.
The Brussels waffle is light and rectangular, made from a batter and built for toppings. The Liège waffle is a dense brioche dough studded with pearl sugar that caramelises in the iron, eaten plain on the street. The one buried in cream and strawberries is for photos. America’s ‘Belgian waffle’ was sold as the Bel-Gem at the 1964 World’s Fair because too few Americans could place Brussels.
Start with the name. The story that American soldiers in the First World War called them French because the Belgians serving them spoke French is a legend: ‘French fried potatoes’ was already in an English cookbook in 1856. Belgium’s own origin myth, villagers in the Meuse valley frying potatoes when the river froze before 1680, rests on a manuscript nobody has ever produced. Even the Belgian food historian Pierre Leclercq concludes that the first ones were fried in Paris.
So much for who fried first. What Belgium did was turn them into a culture: thousands of fritkots — frituur in Flemish, friterie in French — serving fries fried twice, often in beef fat, in a paper cone with the sauce on top. Mayonnaise is the default; samurai and andalouse are how you order like a local. Flanders listed fritkot culture as heritage in 2014 and the French-speaking community followed in 2016. Even Scotland’s first chips were sold, in the 1870s, by a Belgian.
How to eat them: at a fritkot, not a restaurant, and standing up. Add stoofvlees, the Flemish beef stew made with beer, if you are properly hungry. Belgium got its beer culture onto UNESCO’s list in 2016; the fritkot has so far made it only onto the country’s own lists. A country that once took 541 days to form a government is in no hurry, and neither is the queue at the counter.
Answers about data, coverage and setup for Belgium.
Yes. Belgium is on the Europe plan, and so are the Netherlands, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, so the same package and allowance carry on across every border the trains from Brussels-Midi cross. The phone switches to a partner network in the next country within a minute or two. In tunnels and deep cuttings the signal can dip at speed, as it does on any SIM.
In Belgium itself, usually not: roam-like-at-home covers you within your plan’s fair-use limit. The package earns its keep for visitors from outside the EU — the UK, Switzerland, the Balkans, Türkiye, the US — whose home networks usually charge for data here, or if your allowance is small. One catch on the Eurostar: since Brexit, EU rules no longer guarantee free roaming in the UK. The Europe plan covers it.
Orange or Proximus, the two networks listed under Local networks on this page. The phone chooses one on its own when you switch the onesim line on with data roaming enabled. If you land and see no service after a minute or two, pick one by hand under Settings → Mobile Data → Network Selection, and leave data roaming on for the onesim line only.
