Belgium with kids

Nine steel spheres joined by tubes you walk and escalator through, built for the 1958 world fair. Twenty dollars.

The history of chocolate with a praline demonstration and tasting. Nineteen dollars.

Locomotives staged in a converted station, lit like a theatre set. Seventeen dollars and quietly the best museum here for a child.

Three hundred cars from 1886 onwards in a glass-roofed hall. Twenty-one dollars.

Sixteen dollars, and the most immediately readable gallery in the city for a child.

Thirty dollars, with a Belgian Miniland. Adults are not admitted without a child.

A hands-on science centre with hundreds of experiments, half an hour north. Thirty-three dollars and a full day.

The biggest theme park in Belgium, on the coast, built around Flemish children's characters. Fifty-nine dollars.

The water park beside Plopsaland, thirty-one dollars. Indoor and outdoor, so it runs year round.

The indoor branch, thirty-one dollars, aimed at preschoolers. The wet-day answer in the east.

Make your own pralines and take them away, with the museum on the same ticket. Fifty-two dollars.

Twenty-nine dollars, and the Atomium is a long way from the centre.

A fortified capital on a gorge and a Belgian river town with a citadel, on one day from Brussels. Seventy-eight dollars.

Sixteen dollars with an audio guide, and a demonstration at the end. Cheaper than the Brussels branch.

A story-led walk through medieval Bruges with actors on screen, ending at a tower over the market square. Twenty-four dollars.

Flemish primitives — Van Eyck and Memling — in a small, finishable museum. Seventeen dollars.

A merchant's palace with five hundred years of the family's things still in it. Seventeen dollars.

A medieval hospital with its apothecary intact, seventeen dollars. Grim and fascinating in equal measure.

Michelangelo's Madonna, the only sculpture of his to leave Italy in his lifetime. Nine dollars.

Twenty-nine dollars for a loop of a town you can cross on foot in twenty minutes — useful only with very small legs.

All the city museums on one card, fifty-seven dollars. Only worth it if you are staying two days.

Both medieval cities from Brussels, fifty-seven dollars. The efficient version if you are not staying over.