To understand what made that ambition necessary, it’s worth rewinding to the operation it was built to serve. In the early hours of 6 June 1944, the largest amphibious invasion in history got underway off the coast of Normandy. More than 150,000 Allied soldiers (mainly Americans, British and Canadians) landed on five beaches the world would come to know as Utah Beach, Omaha Beach, Gold Beach, Juno Beach and Sword Beach.

D-Day, as the day became known, marked the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany and would ultimately lead to the liberation of Western Europe. But the price was steep. An estimated 3,000 to 4,400 Allied servicemen were killed that day, while German forces also suffered heavy losses.

A temporary harbour

One of the invasion’s greatest logistical challenges was how to get troops, vehicles, ammunition and supplies ashore without first capturing an existing port. French harbours, such as the one at Dunkirk, were heavily defended, and a direct assault would have come at an enormous cost. Even if captured, the Germans would undoubtedly have destroyed or disabled them.

The solution was as simple as it was bold: if there was no harbour, the Allies would build one themselves. This gave rise to the so-called Mulberry Harbours — two temporary ports prefabricated in sections in Britain and towed to Normandy after D-Day.

Loading and unloading

One harbour, Mulberry A, was located off Omaha Beach; the second, Mulberry B, was assembled off the coast of Arromanches-les-Bains and served British and Canadian troops.

The Mulberry harbours consisted, among other things, of floating concrete pontoons that served as quays. Ships could dock there to unload their cargo.

Breakwaters

To shield the harbour from wave action, old ships were scuttled and hollow concrete caissons — known as Phoenix caissons — were filled with water and sunk, forming artificial breakwaters.

The smaller caissons were used as floating quays and transport roads to bring trucks, tanks and other vehicles ashore.

Just days after the Normandy landings, the temporary harbour at Arromanches-les-Bains was already operational. In the months that followed, it processed thousands of tonnes of supplies, tens of thousands of vehicles, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Today, at low tide, you can still see the silhouettes of the huge concrete caissons that were set into the sea in 1944.

Invasion beaches named World Heritage

More than eighty years after the fact, the Normandy invasion beaches were added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List in the summer of 2026.

The listing covers a stretch of coastline more than 80 kilometres long, encompassing the five invasion beaches — Utah Beach, Omaha Beach, Juno Beach, Gold Beach and Sword Beach — along with Pointe du Hoc, the steep cliffs where American Rangers stormed a heavily guarded German gun battery on D-Day.

After the Second World War ended, some surplus caissons were towed to Ritthem in the Netherlands, where they were used to repair the breached dikes and drain the flooded island of Walcheren.

The rest of the temporary harbour remained in Arromanches-les-Bains. The dozens of concrete caissons, once intended as a stopgap solution, now stand as a lasting memorial to D-Day and the liberation of Europe.

Practical information

The caissons are scattered across the beach and out in the sea at Arromanches-les-Bains, and are best seen at low tide.

At the nearby Arromanches 360 museum, you can rediscover the full construction and workings of the Mulberry Harbour through scale models, film footage and original artefacts, gaining a real understanding of how this floating city at sea actually functioned.

Mulberry Harbour
D514
14117 Arromanches-les-Bains
France

GPS: 49.341382°, -0.620235°

Links

• Arromanches.com: Ports Artificiels

• UNESCO: Beaches of the D-Day Landings, Normandy, 1944

• About the artificial harbours

• Wikipedia: Mulberry Harbour

• Liberation Route Europe: the artificial harbour of Arromanches

The river’s winding bends were straightened over a distance of thirty kilometres in 1769 to promote shipping. The cut-off river arms were either filled in or left behind in the landscape, as at this spot.

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The Horta Line, as the work is called, is constructed from bluestone that once graced the facade of the House of the People in Brussels, an Art Nouveau building designed by architect Victor Horta in the late 19th century for the Belgian Workers’ Party, which would establish its headquarters there.

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To uncover that story, we need to travel back in time. The first edition of the festival took place in August 2005, at the recreational domain De Schorre, a former clay pit that had been shut down over the course of the twentieth century.

Traces of excavation

The abandoned clay pits were taken over by the Province of Antwerp in 1986. Drying sheds, kilns, chimneys and warehouses all disappeared from the scene. The derelict site was then transformed into a recreational and nature area, with a few traces of its industrial past deliberately preserved.

Today, when you stand in front of Tomorrowland’s main stage, you’re not just looking at the décor and the light shows. The undulating landscape itself tells a story: those hills and hollows are the fingerprints of decades of clay extraction. This clay (Boomse clay) was used to produce bricks and roof tiles.

Rave Cave

Dive into the Rave Cave during Tomorrowland, and you’re stepping straight into a piece of industrial history. The festival’s smallest stage sits inside a former brick-kiln tunnel, a passageway once used by horse-drawn carts or narrow-gauge trains to haul clay and bricks away from the site.

The Trollenbos (”Troll Forest”), right next to the festival grounds, is also teeming with industrial remnants, including a concrete overpass that no longer leads anywhere.

Trolls

That overpass was once used to transport excavated clay by wagon to a processing facility belonging to the Anvereeth brickworks. Since 2019, Hannes — one of the seven giant trolls created by Danish artist Thomas Dambo — has stood guard over these ruins.

At the edge of a scraped-out clay pit deeper in the Trollenbos, you’ll find a crumbling clay extraction machine slowly falling apart. Troll Mikil keeps a watchful eye on this machine.

Terhagen

Even beyond the festival grounds, the link to the industrial past remains visible. To the east of De Schorre stretches a vast clay extraction area that has swallowed up more than half the land of the hamlet of Terhagen. Here you’ll find an extraction machine half-submerged in one of the flooded pits.

Clay pits began claiming more than half of Terhagen’s territory from the late nineteenth century onward. After the extraction ended, nature slowly began to reclaim its space, as this twisted carcass of a clay dredger shows you.

Camping DreamVille

The traces of industrial heritage are just as unmistakable around the DreamVille campsite, which stretches between Nachtegaalstraat and Rumstsestraat. That second entrance sits right next to the now-disused water tower of Rumst.

A viewing tower stands alongside this 35-metre-high water tower from 1943, offering a panoramic view over a still-active clay extraction area that borders the campsite.

Visiting Tomorrowland means stepping not just into a festival world, but into a landscape where the history of the Rupel region is still very much present and visible.

More remnants

Elsewhere in Boom and along the Rupel, you’ll also come across old brickworks, drying sheds and brick-kiln tunnels — for instance, at ‘t Geleeg (photo below) or Brik Boom.

Whoever walks today through the overgrown ruins of a former brickworks in Turnhout will recognise very little: cracked walls, a ring kiln that will never burn again, and in winter, hundreds of bats that have made it their sleeping quarters.

Industrial adventure

But at the beginning of the twentieth century, this was the birthplace of one of the greatest industrial adventures Belgium has ever known. And the man behind that adventure was named Martin Verbeeck.

Verbeeck was born in 1882 in Dessel, a small village in the Antwerp Kempen. He began his career as a contractor in public works and, by 1910, was already a co-shareholder of this now-overgrown brickworks. But it was the First World War that made him wealthy. While Europe lay in ruins, timber prices rose spectacularly.

Verbeeck seized the opportunity and did a roaring trade buying and selling timber and exploiting forests, including in the Zwart Goor area, then invested that capital in a sector where he saw the future: cement. On the Zwart Goor estate, he erected all manner of concrete ornaments to illustrate the versatility of cement.

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The Opexwijk district was built from the ground up in the 1920s to house residents from the former Vuurtorenwijk (Lighthouse Quarter) on the east bank. That neighbourhood was razed to make way for the new fish market, and so a brand-new district rose on the other side of the road.

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This cast-iron geodetic post from 1853 is one such marker. It is a reminder of the method used by nineteenth-century surveyors to accurately map distances: geodesy, and more specifically, triangulation.

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.The so-called Stützpunkt Fichte, or Nord Batterie, was one of four German anti-aircraft batteries ringing the port city of Vlissingen. Situated on the Westerschelde — the estuary that opens into the port of Antwerp — Vlissingen held considerable strategic importance during the war.

‘A barrage of fire’

The city also sat squarely beneath one of the main approach routes used by Allied bombers heading into Germany. It is no coincidence that Vlissingen became one of the most heavily bombed cities in the Netherlands, despite what German propagandists called the “powerful barrage of German air defences.”

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The Compagnie du Chemin de Fer Ostende-Armentières laid railway line 62 in the second half of the nineteenth century to establish a fast international rail connection between Ostend and Paris. From 1868 onwards, three steam trains chugged daily between the two cities. The seaside resort’s popularity among the French bourgeoisie led, towards the end of the nineteenth century, to the construction of a second track.

But by the early twentieth century, the golden years were over. During the interwar period, international trains ran only in summer. The Second World War delivered the final blow: the Germans tore up the second track. On 26 May 1963, the last passenger train ran the route. Four years later, freight traffic ceased for good.

Museum line

From the late 1970s, the Belgian Friends of the Steam Locomotive campaigned to turn the line into a museum railway and run steam engines along it.

After the tracks were lifted in 1985, a proposal emerged to lay a tourist tramway alongside the walking and cycling path, over which steam trams could operate. But that plan too came to nothing. Relaid as a walking and cycling path from 1988 onwards, the museum railway scheme quietly disappeared from the agenda.

Green valley

The railway line has not entirely vanished from the landscape, however.

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Deep beneath the frozen earth’s crust lie rich deposits of iron ore and rare earth metals. The history of Kiruna, therefore, only began in the late nineteenth century, when geologists, including Hjalmar Lundbohm, pushed ever farther north in search of iron ore. In Kiruna, they struck gold—so to speak.

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In 1886, Petrus Vermylen founded a so-called starch factory along the Scheldt. The location was strategically chosen: the plot was situated not only right next to the river, but also in the immediate vicinity of Baasrode-Noord station, on the former line 52 between Dendermonde and Antwerp-Zuid. Water and rail formed the arteries of the industrial economy, and Vermylen knew this all too well.

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Stretching behind the park lies a brownfield site that was once home to the Alvat facility, better known locally as ‘t Vatenkot, literally “the Barrel Shed.” The company purchased used industrial barrels still coated with thick residues of chemicals, insecticides and oils. The surplus contents were dumped into pits, while the contaminated wastewater used to rinse the barrels was discharged directly into the Scheldt River. The cleaned-up barrels were then given a fresh coat of paint and resold.

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The construction type Regelbau 636 was specifically designed as a fire control post for coastal batteries. The structure housed, among other things, a calculation room, radio room, crew quarters, and observation room.

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The Class 73 shunting loc…

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The Boom clay that was excavated in massive quantities from the clay pits well into the twentieth century was transported across this passerel to the processing plant of the Anvereeth brickworks. Small wagons carried the clay along the pillar structure to a machine hall where the rich, fatty clay was ground and kneaded, the first step in producing bricks.

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This year, Paris-Roubaix takes place on…

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The 22.7-kilometre-long railway line 108 between Mariemont and Erquelinnes was already put into service in 1857. The original Binche station was replaced in 1911 by a new building designed by architect Pierre Langerock. He designed a neo-Gothic building that, nowadays, seems rather large for a dead-end line, but it dates from before the partial dismantling of the railway line.

Since 1962, trains have no longer run beyond Binche. The station itself has been protected as a monument since 1978, but has been left to its fate. Travellers can still use the waiting room, but the ticket offices have been closed since 2021.

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The Star Tower was then one of the first university buildings of the Utrecht Science Park, but not for long. The dark polders of yesteryear quickly transformed into a packed university campus where high-rise buildings not only obstructed the view but also caused light pollution.

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