Café Vlissinghe, Bruges

The claim

Hidden in the quiet Sint-Anna quarter away from Bruges' crowds, Vlissinghe has been pouring since at least 1515. Wood panelling, a big stove, old paintings and a garden terrace make it feel like a Flemish genre painting come to life. Its heritage collection, catalogued for the 500th birthday, includes a centuries-old card game found in a mantelpiece.

What the records show

Owners of the two houses are named in Bruges archives from the last quarter of the fifteenth century, and in 1515 the owner is described for the first time as a tavernier — an innkeeper. That entry, in the city's register of the sixteenths, is the record behind the 1515 the café claims, and the Flemish heritage agency's inventory carries it in its own words: the history of this inn goes back to the first half of the sixteenth century, and the oldest mention reaches 1515 according to the register of the sixteenths. The same entry classes the building's type as an inn and dates the fabric to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — two joined houses of two storeys under separate saddle roofs, a blind three-bay front of the seventeenth century on the left against a sixteenth-century front to the right, with traces of older openings in the brickwork. The name Vlissinghe appears in documents from 1579, an inventory of about the same date lists tables and benches, and in 1648 the property is called plainly a house and inn. Dutch Wikipedia and the café itself call it the oldest surviving café in Bruges. The room a drinker sits in owes much to Leon De Meulemeester, whose family bought the house in 1855 and who fitted it out from 1869 with neo-baroque furniture, bought-in old paintings and a genuine seventeenth-century black marble chimneypiece; the garden pavilion was fitted out to the taste of the Kunstgenegen, an artists' circle founded in 1894, and still carries their mottoes on its panelling.

Dated evidence for Café Vlissinghe, earliest first
Year	What	Source
1515	Claimed founding	The pub
1515	First record of a drinking house here	Flanders heritage inventory

What to look for inside

First recorded in 1515
Contents catalogued as heritage collection for 500th anniversary
Old playing cards found in the mantelpiece
Garden terrace in the Sint-Anna quarter

Visiting

Café Vlissinghe is in Bruges, Belgium, at Blekersstraat 2, 8000 Brugge. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

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