Sint-Janshospitaal & Memling Museum

This building operated as a hospital for over eight hundred years. Founded in the mid-12th century, Sint-Janshospitaal cared for the sick, the poor, travellers, and pilgrims until 1977, when medical activities were finally moved to a modern hospital in Sint-Pieters. That makes it one of the oldest surviving hospital buildings in Europe — a place where people have been treated for illness since the era of the Crusades.

The medieval hospital ward is a vast open hall with soaring Gothic arches, and it is disorienting to stand in a space where patients lay in rows for centuries. The friars and sisters who ran the hospital lived by a rule established in 1188, and the hospital grew into a complex that included a monastery, a convent, a pharmacy, and a brewery — because in the Middle Ages, beer was safer to drink than water, and hospitals brewed their own.

But the real draw is the Memling Museum within the complex. Hans Memling, a German-born painter who spent most of his career in Bruges, created four of the seven masterpieces displayed here specifically for Sint-Janshospitaal, and they have hung in this building since the late 15th century. The Musea Brugge Memling collection is the second largest in the world. The most famous work is the Shrine of St Ursula, a gilded wooden reliquary painted with exquisite miniature scenes depicting the legend of Saint Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins — a work so delicate it feels like it was painted with a single-hair brush.

The old pharmacy, with its original 17th-century cabinets and ceramic jars, is worth a visit in itself. Medieval pharmacies mixed herbal remedies, mineral compounds, and occasionally substances that would now be classified as recreational drugs. The line between medicine and magic was thin.