Josaphat Park

This guide to Josaphat Park in Brussels opens at a timber auction outside the city in the late 1890s, where a mysterious buyer keeps outbidding everyone for a widow's poplar trees on behalf of King Leopold II. It follows the standoff between the widow, Martha, and the crown over the felling clause in her sale, and how the valley's English-style paths and ponds later took shape. You'll also hear the legend behind the valley's biblical name, carried home by a sixteenth-century pilgrim.