Grand Place

The Grand Place is identifiable by the tall Column of the Goddess standing at its center, a stone figure atop a grooved granite pillar. Officially named the Place du Général de Gaulle, this square began as a medieval marketplace drained from marshland. Over the centuries, it became the site where the city’s civic and commercial life converged, eventually split into two sections in the middle of the seventeenth century by the construction of the Vieille Bourse.