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Belgium is a sovereign state in Western Europe with three official languages: Dutch, French and German. It is a constitutional monarchy with a federal parliamentary system and a member of the European Union and NATO.
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The national flag of the Kingdom of Belgium is a tricolour...
- German-speaking Community
The German-speaking Community (German: Deutschsprachige...
- French Community of Belgium
The French Community of Belgium includes 4.5 million people,...
- City of Brussels
The City of Brussels [a] is the largest municipality and...
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Philippe [a] (born 15 April 1960) is King of the Belgians.He...
- Healthcare in Belgium
Healthcare in Belgium is composed of three parts. Firstly,...
- Luxembourg (Belgium)
Luxembourg (French: Luxembourg [lyksɑ̃buʁ] ⓘ; Dutch:...
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The Belgian Armed Forces (Dutch: Defensie; French: La...
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Learn about the history of Belgium, from prehistory to the present, covering its geography, culture, politics and conflicts. Explore the origins of the names Belgium and Flanders, the Burgundian and Austrian Netherlands, and the modern Belgian state.
Learn about Belgium, a country in Western Europe with three regions and three official languages. Find out its history, geography, government, economy, culture and more from this simple and clear article.
Belgium has three main geographical regions: the coastal plain in the north-west, the central plateau, and the Ardennes uplands in the south-east. The coastal plain consists mainly of sand dunes and polders .
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Belgium, country of northwestern Europe. It is one of the smallest and most densely populated European countries, and it has been, since its independence in 1830, a representative democracy headed by a hereditary constitutional monarch. Initially, Belgium had a unitary form of government. In the 1980s and ’90s, however, steps were taken to turn Belgium into a federal state with powers shared among the regions of Flanders, Wallonia, and the Brussels-Capital Region.
Culturally, Belgium is a heterogeneous country straddling the border between the Romance and Germanic language families of western Europe. With the exception of a small German-speaking population in the eastern part of the country, Belgium is divided between a French-speaking people, collectively called Walloons (approximately one-third of the total population), who are concentrated in the five southern provinces (Hainaut, Namur, Liège, Walloon Brabant, and Luxembourg), and Flemings, a Flemish- (Dutch-) speaking people (more than one-half of the total population), who are concentrated in the five northern and northeastern provinces (West Flanders, East Flanders [West-Vlaanderen, Oost-Vlaanderen], Flemish Brabant, Antwerp, and Limburg). Just north of the boundary between Walloon Brabant (Brabant Walloon) and Flemish (Vlaams) Brabant lies the officially bilingual but majority French-speaking Brussels-Capital Region, with approximately one-tenth of the total population. (See also Fleming and Walloon.)
The country has a total of 860 miles (1,385 km) of land boundaries with neighbours; it is bounded by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, and France to the south. Belgium also has some 40 miles (60 km) of shoreline on the North Sea.
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Belgium generally is a low-lying country, with a broad coastal plain extending in a southeasterly direction from the North Sea and the Netherlands and rising gradually into the Ardennes hills and forests of the southeast, where a maximum elevation of 2,277 feet (694 metres) is reached at Botrange.
The main physical regions are the Ardennes and the Ardennes foothills; Côtes Lorraines (Belgian Lorraine), the intrusion of the Paris Basin in the south; and the Anglo-Belgian Basin in the north, comprising the Central Plateaus, the plain of Flanders, and the Kempenland (French: Campine).
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The Ardennes region is part of the Hercynian orogenic belt of mountain ranges, which reaches from western Ireland into Germany and was formed roughly 300 to 400 million years ago, during the Paleozoic Era. The Ardennes is a plateau cut deeply by the Meuse River and its tributaries. Its higher points contain peat bogs and have poor drainage; these uplands are unsuitable as cropland.
A large depression, known east of the Meuse River as the Famenne and west of it as the Fagne, separates the Ardennes from the geologically and topographically complex foothills to the north. The principal feature of the area is the Condroz, a plateau more than 1,100 feet (335 metres) in elevation comprising a succession of valleys hollowed out of the limestone between sandstone crests. Its northern boundary is the Sambre-Meuse valley, which traverses Belgium from south-southwest to northeast.
Learn about Belgium, a small and densely populated country in northwestern Europe, with a rich and diverse cultural heritage. Explore its history, geography, politics, economy, and more from Britannica, the authoritative source of information.
Learn about Belgium, a country in Northwestern Europe with a complex political system and a rich history. Explore its culture, geography, people, economy, and more through articles, images, and news on this portal.
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Learn about the three official languages of Belgium: Dutch, French, and German, and their legal status, distribution, and history. Find out how Belgian Dutch, French, and German differ from their counterparts in other countries and regions.
