Lennik
Kasteel van Gaasbeek Park & Museum Garden
Kasteel van Gaasbeek is surrounded by a 49-hectare romantic park in the Pajottenland, renowned for its seventeenth-century baroque pavilion, ancient beech avenues, and the internationally acclaimed Museum Garden of historic fruit espaliers.
From the source
Kasteel van Gaasbeek is a château at Lennik, Vlaams-Brabant, in Belgium. The recorded building campaigns date from the 13th, 14th, 15th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Its architecture is recorded as barok. The register records it as “beschermd onroerend erfgoed”. Details are drawn from the Inventaris Onroerend Erfgoed (Vlaanderen).
Editorial reading
Dominating the rolling landscape of the Pajottenland south-west of Brussels, the medieval castle of Gaasbeek was transformed in the late nineteenth century by the eccentric Marquise Arconati Visconti into a Romanticist neo-medieval palace. The accompanying 49-hectare domain preserves landscape layers stretching back to the seventeenth century. The park is laid out across dramatic hillside topography, featuring a chain of three historic carp ponds, ancient beech and oak woodland, and historic baroque architectural fabriques including an early seventeenth-century octagonal Baroque pavilion, a neo-Gothic chapel, and a triumphal arch erected in honour of Napoleon Bonaparte. Adjacent to the castle ramparts lies the Museum Garden (Museumtuin), a living museum of seventeenth-to-nineteenth-century horticulture. Spanning four terraces, it features Europe's most comprehensive collection of rare trained fruit trees—pruned in intricate espalier, cordon, fan, and palmette shapes—alongside a traditional French pleasure garden, a Flemish kitchen garden, and an heirloom rose collection. Managed by the Flemish Community, Gaasbeek offers a poetic synthesis of Bruegel-like rolling farmland, romantic woodland allées, and world-class horticultural mastery.
Recommendation
Marvel at Europe's finest collection of historic fruit espaliers in the Museum Garden and walk romantic wooded avenues overlooking Pajottenland valleys.
Sources
Inventaris Onroerend Erfgoed (Vlaanderen) · 39928 — Modellicentie Gratis Hergebruik / CC BY-SA 4.0
Wikimedia Commons · https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Kasteelgaasbeek.jpg — CC BY-SA 3.0
The château by this garden
Discover the architecture and history of this place at Le Roi du Château.
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