Ghent Alone: A Solo Traveler's Guide
Nobody rushes you in Ghent, and that’s the whole appeal for a solo trip here: a university city of 85,000 students moves at a pace that never expects you to be somewhere with someone else.
Sit with the altarpiece, unhurried
The Ghent Altarpiece rewards exactly the kind of unhurried attention a solo visit makes easy: no one is waiting on you to move along, so take the time to actually work through Jan van Eyck’s botanical detail and the polyptych’s layered theology. The visit still needs a separate timed ticket from the cathedral itself, about €12.50 adult, booked ahead through sintbaafskathedraal.be or reserved online rather than at the door.
Coffee and reading along the canals
Take Five Espressobar and Mokabon, Ghent’s oldest coffee bar, roasting beans since 1937, both work well for an hour alone with a book and a pour-over, tucked into the canal-side streets rather than a chain storefront.
Night photography under the Lichtplan
Ghent’s award-winning architectural lighting plan illuminates monuments and canals every night from dusk to midnight, and walking the quiet cobblestone alleys after midnight with a tripod is a genuinely solo activity: nobody else wants to stand still in the cold that long for one shot.
Browsing the Ajuinlei book stalls
Secondhand book stalls set up along the Ajuinlei canal embankment on Sunday mornings, a slow, low-stakes way to spend an hour that doesn’t require anyone else’s patience for browsing. It’s the kind of stop that only works alone; a companion waiting on you to finish flipping through a crate of old paperbacks changes the whole rhythm of it.
Kayaking alone
Paddling the Leie and Lieve canals solo, past the Gravensteen’s walls and under Saint Michael’s Bridge, works as well for one person as it does for a group; renting a kayak is a straightforward booking rather than something you need company to justify.
On safety
Ghent is consistently rated among Europe’s safer university cities, and solo travelers, including solo women, can walk or cycle through the central neighborhoods at most hours without the city feeling risky the way some bigger capitals do after dark. That said, ordinary city sense still applies around the train station late at night, same as anywhere, and a solo diner should know Flemish restaurants rarely blink at a table for one, even in Patershol’s smaller, candlelit rooms.
Verdict: build a solo day around one slow, deliberate stop, the altarpiece or a long coffee, rather than trying to tick off every sight alone; solitude works better here as a pace than a checklist. For the paired-up version of the same city, see the romantic getaways guide .