Volkskundemuseum

This guide to the Volkskundemuseum in Bruges starts with what growing old as a Bruges shoemaker actually meant: not a pension, but one bare room in a row of guild-built almshouses like this. It traces how the city's shoemakers guild raised these eight houses in the 1600s as a rente, a pension paid in brick rather than coin, for cobblers and widows alike. You'll hear how the row sat empty until the city bought it in 1967 and reopened it four years later as a museum, its old rooms refitted as workshops for trades from cooperage to hatmaking. Walk the corridor and look for the smells and sounds still coming from those recreated workbenches.