Royal Galleries of Ostend, Neoclassical colonnade along the beach in Ostend, Belgium.
The Royal Galleries of Ostend is a covered walkway over 380 metres long, built between 1902 and 1906 to a design by Charles Girault. It has two parallel colonnades of paired Tuscan columns on bluestone pedestals, partly divided by a glass wall, and ends at each side in a closed pavilion with a salon. The Thermae Palace Hotel sits above the central section.
Architect Charles Girault designed the structure around 1906 on commission from King Leopold II. The project aimed to connect the royal residence with nearby facilities and provide the growing seaside resort with a modern waterfront promenade.
The galleries were built so the king and his guests could walk from the royal villa to the Wellington racecourse without facing rain or wind. The Ostend symbolist painter Léon Spilliaert used the colonnade as a subject, and it appears in his painting La Nuit, held in the Belgian State collection.
The galleries run along the seafront dike between the royal villa and the Wellington racecourse, with a pavilion at each end and the Thermae Palace Hotel above the central section. The walkway is covered along its whole 380-metre length, so rain and wind do not interrupt the route. The beach and its wooden cabins lie directly in front of the colonnade.
During World War II, German forces sealed the spaces between the columns to incorporate the structure into their Atlantic Wall coastal defenses. Traces of this wartime modification remain visible in certain sections and tell a lesser-known chapter of the site's past.
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