Parc de Bruxelles

This guide to Parc de Bruxelles traces the formal park from its 1770s layout, when nearly twelve hundred trees were felled to lay out its geometric avenues, to four days in September 1830, when about eight thousand Dutch soldiers under Prince Frederick tried to retake the city from an uprising that had broken out at a nearby opera house. It follows ordinary Brussels residents, armed with hunting guns and muskets pulled from armories, as they turned the park's clipped avenues and sightlines into cover against a trained army. Stand by the central pond and look down the long straight paths the fighting once ran through.