Het Steen

A settlement and castle stood on this bank of the Scheldt as early as the Carolingian ninth century, and the first fortifications may have followed the Viking incursions — the Normans invaded Flanders in 879. The Margraviate of Antwerp came into being around 974, on the imperial side of a river frontier: the duchy belonged to the Holy Roman Empire, while across the Scheldt lay the county of Flanders, subordinate to the king of France. Godfrey of Bouillon held the margraviate from 1076 to 1100; Godfrey I, Count of Louvain, received the duchy in 1106, and his great-grandson Henry I became Duke of Brabant in 1183.

The building now called Het Steen was raised between 1200 and 1225 as the gate building of the Antwerp burcht, set against the city's first stone fortification wall beside the south gate — a position from which the fortress controlled access to the Scheldt. It is Antwerp's oldest surviving building, yet it covers less than five per cent of the original stronghold, which enclosed the Vierschaar court, the Sint-Walburgiskerk and the refuge of the Benedictine abbey of Affligem, with the fish market lying just outside the walls.

Around 1520, under Charles V, the gatehouse was thoroughly rebuilt and took the name 's-Heeren Steen — the King's stone castle — later shortened simply to Het Steen. The Dutch steen means "stone", but the word once served for a fortress or palace, as in the Gravensteen at Ghent. In 1549 Charles V gave the building to the city of Antwerp, which kept it in its ownership until 1828.

Het Steen served the city as schepenbank — the aldermen's house — and as vierschaar, its court of justice, and from 1303 to 1823 it was Antwerp's prison. Executions took place within its walls: in the years 1557 to 1565, supporters of the Reformation were secretly drowned there.

From 1823 the building housed invalid soldiers. The state requisitioned it in 1827 and sold it to a wood-sawyer a year later; in 1842 the city bought its old gatehouse back.

In 1862 Pieter Génard proposed Het Steen as the seat of an antiquarian museum for Antwerp; after a restoration by the architect Kennes, the museum opened on 14 August 1864. Then, in the 1880s, the greater part of the old burcht — dozens of historic houses and the city's oldest church among them — was demolished when the Scheldt was widened and its quays straightened to stop the river silting up. Only a small cluster of buildings around the medieval gate survived, and a new wing in neo-Gothic and neo-traditional style was added in 1887–1890.

In 1952 the antiquarian museum gave way to the National Maritime Museum, whose indoor galleries closed on 28 December 2008, the collection passing to the new Museum aan de Stroom. A major restoration — funded under a 2017 agreement that set aside some 35.5 million euros for Het Steen and the town hall together — remade the building as the Antwerp Visitor Center, opened on 22 October 2021 with a multimedia route through the city's history in eleven rooms and a 350-metre cruise ponton moored on the Scheldt below. The renovated building won the Onroerenderfgoedprijs heritage award in October 2022.