Place Royale

Place Royale features a uniform facade of neoclassical stone buildings arranged in a perfect square. Designed in the seventeen seventies by architects Barnabé Guimard and Joachim Zinner, the square replaced a medieval palace complex that burned down decades earlier. During the Brabant Revolution in seventeen eighty-nine, the space became a battlefield where local rebels fought Austrian imperial troops. The cobblestones still hold the marks of that conflict, where control of this exact ground signaled dominance over the city of Brussels.