Brussels - Quartier des Marolles

The Quartier des Marolles occupies a triangular area on the south side of Brussels' center between the Gare du Midi, Porte de Hal and, towering high above everything, the Palais de Justice. Up to now the district has always been the preserve of the under-privileged, living by their wits and deeply distrustful of "the authorities". This distrust has been fuelled anew now that the very survival of the quarter is threatened by a wave of speculative building and an influx of EC employees for whom the Marolles is the "smart" place to have an apartment - after it has been luxuriously restored that is! About 10,000 people live in the area, mainly low wage earners, shopkeepers and tradespeople, often speaking a patois incomprehensible to outsiders by whom they tend to be regarded as loud-mouthed and uncouth. Even in the Middle Ages the Marolles was a refuge for the persecuted and today as many as a third of its inhabitants are thought to be illegal immigrants. The quarter's most famous son was Pieter Bruegel the Elder whose house stands in the Rue Haute (Hoogstraat; No. 132).