Hoge Kempen

The Hoge Kempen is high ground by courtesy of a vanished river. In the ice ages the Meuse ran broad and braided here and buried the land under a sheet of gravel; when it later slipped eastward into its present valley the abandoned bed was left standing as the Kempens Plateau, edged by an escarpment that drops abruptly to the Maasland with, on a clear day, Germany beyond. Rain drains straight through gravel, so the plateau grew nothing but heath, and heath is what the park protects at a scale Flanders has nowhere else: whole horizons of it on the Mechelse Heide, purple for three weeks from mid-August, running into an inland dune belt — the Duinengordel, whose Oudsberg is the highest land dune in Flanders — and pocked by quarry lakes of implausible turquoise, the colour of water over pure white silica sand.

Everything else about the place is coal. The Limburg coalfield was discovered in 1901 by a borehole at As, on the park's edge; the pines that now cover half the park were planted as pit props, a crop for the galleries below; and when the last Limburg mine closed in 1992 the region was left with its slag heaps, its garden cities and no work. The national park was the answer — an idea pushed for years by the regional landscape association and its director Ignace Schops, who stitched some 5,700 hectares together for the opening in 2006, Belgium's first national park, and collected the Goldman Environmental Prize for it two years later. A 2020 masterplan then doubled the park to 12,742 hectares across ten municipalities, and the 2023 Flemish decree made it one of four Nationale Parken. Its main gateway, Connecterra, sits squarely on the old Eisden colliery at Terhills, where the terrils — the spoil heaps, now scrubbed with birch — are the closest thing Flanders has to summits and give the best view in the province.

The park never pretends the industry is over: working silica-sand quarries still bite into the heath inside the perimeter, the boundary having been drawn around their licences on the understanding that restoration follows the diggers — the older pits are already the park's clearest lakes and steepest cliffs. On the heath itself the specialties are southern and warmth-loving: nightjars churring from the pine edges on June nights, woodlarks over the sand, smooth snakes under the Calluna. And the visiting infrastructure is a local invention in more ways than one — the numbered cycle-node network that now covers the whole of the Low Countries was devised in the 1990s by Hugo Bollen, a Limburg mining engineer, using the coalfield's disused railbeds, and the park now carries its own celebrated stretch of it through the purple, Fietsen door de Heide.

What's worth knowing before you go

There is no single entrance: six gateways ring the park — Connecterra at Maasmechelen, the Mechelse Heide car park, Lieteberg at Zutendaal, Kattevennen at Genk, the old mine railway station at As, and Pietersheim castle at Lanaken — each with trailheads fanning out; Genk station plus a short bus ride is the practical rail approach. Come in the second half of August for the heather at full burn, and on a weekday if you can: Connecterra shares Terhills with a designer outlet, and summer weekends are dense. The connoisseur's moves are both at the day's edges — up a terril for the light going down over the Maas valley, or out on the Mechelse Heide at dusk in June, when the nightjars start up their sewing-machine churr and the day-trippers are long gone.