Sablon Antiques Night
Twice a year the Sablon dealers stay open past midnight, put a table on the pavement and let people handle things they would normally have to ask about.
The trade comes for the first two hours and everybody else for the rest. Prices are not lower, but the conversations are longer, which is the actual point.
The specialisms are narrower than the square lets on: one dealer sells nothing but scientific instruments, another only textiles from before 1900, a third works exclusively in Belgian silver and will tell you at length why that is a category.
Four restaurants on the square run a single-course menu at a fixed price so the queues move. The chocolate shops stay open too, on the grounds that they always do.
The square closes to cars from six. The nearest parking is under the Palais de Justice, uphill and worth the walk.
Upcoming events
Paper and Press: Three Centuries of Dutch Type
Punches, matrices and proofs from Enschedé, laid out beside the machines that cut them.
Blue Hour: Cyanotypes from the Raval
Forty prints made with river water and morning sun, hung in a former dye works on Carrer de Joaquín Costa.
Form Follows Feeling: A Bauhaus Retrospective
One hundred objects that taught the century how to sit, read and pour. Curated with the Dessau archive.
Spiegelgasse Salon: Four Evenings of New Music
Four evenings in a first-floor room that seats sixty, with the composer in the third row each time.
Chromatic Studies: Albers to Now
Homage to the square, continued. Colour interaction from 1950 to the present in twelve rooms.
Refshaleøen Winter Market
Forty stalls in an unheated shipyard hall, open four hours a day for three weekends.