Arvind Bhatt's video: Walking in Bruges through the narrow cobblestone lanes in 4K

Bruges is one of the best preserved medieval cities in the world thanks to the fact that it didn’t become a popular tourist destination until the late nineteenth century. It was founded during the eleventh century surrounding a fortress established as long ago as the ninth century. Until the fifteenth century Bruges (Brugges in Dutch) was one of the wealthiest cities on the continent due to a strategic location and thirst for trade in goods such as fabrics, Portuguese spices, and grains and wines from Normandy. Like Venice, the town is canal-based, and it rapidly transformed into one of the most important commercial centres in the North of Europe. At the end of the fifteenth century the Zwin channel that had been responsible for the city’s good fortune began to stilt and Bruges fell into decline. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, Bruges was run down and poverty-stricken. However over this time it was completely restored, and quickly became a fashionable tourist destination. Currently, over 7.8 million people visit the Bruge’s cobbled streets every year, making it into the country’s most visited town, above even Brussels. Bruges is the capital of the province of West Flanders and was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000. Source: https://www.introducingbrussels.com/bruges