The city is dominated by the Old Master - as well as visiting where he was born (Rubenshuis) and where he was buried (St Jacobs), you can see four of his finest works in the cathedral. The Grote Market, a few steps away, and the network of narrow cobbled streets radiating out from it, are a perfect foil to the more cosmopolitan attractions of the cutting- edge designer stores lining the Meir.Further informationTourism Flanders (tel: 0891 887799, calls cost 50p per minute). In Brussels, the tourist office is on the Grand' Place (tel: 513 8940). The Bulletin - an English-language weekly - has a handy pull-out, What's On.. IN ST LUCIA, it's hard not to believe in God.
There's a certain vibe here, a sense of spirituality that it is hard not to be affected by. In the end, it is this feel of the island that will stay with you; why even those who leave find it impossible really to settle anywhere else. Now I know why my mother has been homesick for more than 30 years She last visited her homeland 12 years ago. Like thousands of other West Indians during the late 1940s and early 1950s, she left the island for the "mother country" in search of work and a better life She was 18 years old. The plane to St Lucia is packed with couples, families, groups of young men and women, all taking advantage of the many cheap package holidays to the Caribbean. When we step off the plane at Hewanorra airport we are instantly enveloped by the heat. Temperatures can reach the mid-nineties during the hottest time of the year from June to August, but it's not an oppressive kind of heat, thanks to the constant trade winds that caress, sometimes buffet, the island At the airport, my mother says: "Everything's changed here.
I don't remember it." But she is still more anxious to begin our holiday than I am, walking faster than I have seen her do in years. The travel brochures, of course, call St Lucia paradise and for once, in our opinion, they are right Nature has a hand in every corner. There is something growing on every spare inch of ground - banana, coconut, breadfruit, mangoes - all in a landscape so rich you want to cry.It's not for nothing that the island is called the Helen of the West Indies, changing hands between the British and the French some 14 times over 150 years. The French influence is the most evident - you see it in family and street names, and also in the cuisine. And although the official language is English, most speak patois, a kind of broken French.Whether St Lucia stays paradisaical is uncertain Just like in the rest of the Caribbean, changes are afoot. The Americanisation of life, from cable TV to shopping malls, proceeds apace. The sugar industry is dead, and bananas are on their way out, immortalised in the song "Banana Death" by Trinidadian singer David Rudder.Instead, we have tourism. New hotels and duty-free shops keep springing up at alarming rates, and the tourist board dreams up annual events to cater for tourists: events such as the annual five-day Jazz Festival, taking place in May, which in 1998 included jazz heavyweights Grover Washington Jr and Chick Corea as well as r 'n' b acts such as Mary J Blige.This is my second visit to the island in three years and it is good to see it taking the festival to its heart.