Bruges was once a saltwater port, and the sea abandoned it. The Zwin inlet, which carried Genoese and Venetian galleys to within a few kilometres of the Markt, silted shut across the fifteenth century. Trade migrated to Antwerp. The cranes stopped. A city of perhaps 45,000 people — among the largest in northern Europe — slid into three centuries of quiet poverty, and that poverty is precisely why the brick gables still stand. Nothing was demolished because nothing could be afforded. When Georges Rodenbach published Bruges-la-Morte in 1892, casting the town as a mourning widow of stone and water, he inadvertently invented Belgian tourism. English and French visitors arrived to see the melancholy. Restoration followed, some of it neo-Gothic invention, and UNESCO inscribed the historic centre in 2000. Travellers arriving today on a bruges guided day tour from paris are walking through a townscape preserved by economic failure and curated by nineteenth-century romantics. The Markt anchors it. The Belfry rises 83 metres above the square, its carillon of 47 bells still rung by a city carillonneur, its upper stages leaning perceptibly to one side after seven hundred years and two lightning fires. Behind it, the Burg square holds the Basilica of the Holy Blood, a Romanesque lower chapel of 1150 stacked beneath a Gothic upper church housing the relic brought back, by tradition, from the Second Crusade. The Church of Our Lady lifts a brick spire 115 metres — the tallest brickwork tower in the Low Countries — and shelters Michelangelo's Madonna and Child, the only sculpture by the artist to leave Italy during his lifetime, purchased by a Bruges cloth merchant in 1504. The collections run deeper than the skyline suggests. The Groeningemuseum holds Jan van Eyck's Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele of 1436 and Hans Memling's altarpieces sit in the medieval hospital of Sint-Jan. These are the founding works of Flemish Primitive painting, made for patrons whose warehouses stood a few streets away. The canals — the reien — are not decorative; they are the working arteries of that vanished commerce, and the reason canal cruise operators still thread the same channels. A bruges guided day tour from paris tour crosses roughly 300 kilometres of northern France and Flanders to reach a city measuring barely two kilometres across, which is the honest arithmetic of the excursion: long roads, compact rewards, and Belgian landmarks that repay every hour of the coach.