Qualla: Campine

Campine: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hikerbiker, CC BY-SA 4.0. Bad soil saved this place. For most of recorded history, the Campine, or Kempen in Dutch, was the region nobody wanted. Sandy, acidic, half-drowned in wet seasons and parched in dry ones, it sprawls across north-eastern Belgium and the southern Netherlands like a forgotten patch sewn between richer fabrics. The monk Stepelinus, writing in the mid-11th century at Saint-Trond, called it Campania, from a Latin root meaning the virgin fields, the uncultivated places. He meant it almost as a shrug. And yet that shrug is what preserved everything that now makes the Campine extraordinary.

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Image: Hikerbiker | CC BY-SA 4.0

Campine: The Monks Who Wanted Nothing

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul Hermans, CC BY-SA 4.0. When you cannot grow grain, you cannot pay taxes. When you cannot pay taxes, the powerful leave you alone. This is why the Campine became a landscape of abbeys. Achel, Postel, Westmalle, Tongerlo, Brecht, Zundert - the monasteries spread across the heath because monks were lookin...

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Image: Paul Hermans | CC BY-SA 4.0

Campine: Buckriders and the Gnome King

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rémih, CC BY-SA 4.0. The poor sandy soil grew folktales as readily as it grew pine. Across the Campine, peasants once whispered about the Bokkenrijders, the Buckriders - bands of thieves said to fly through the night air on the backs of goats, sworn to the devil. The legend likely covered for real ga...

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Image: Rémih | CC BY-SA 4.0

Campine: What the Sand Was Hiding

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CaeyersKris, CC BY-SA 4.0. Then the 19th century arrived and looked at the Campine with new eyes. Beneath the heath lay silica sand pure enough for glassmaking, which is why a company called Sablieres et Carrieres Reunies set up in Mol in 1872 and grew into the firm now known as Sibelco. Beneath that lay c...

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Image: CaeyersKris | CC BY-SA 4.0

Campine: Hoge Kempen, and What Remains

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Van Osta, CC BY-SA 3.0. Not all of it was paved over. In March 2006, Belgium opened its first and still only national park here: Hoge Kempen, nearly sixty square kilometres of heath and pine forest east of Genk, climbing toward the Meuse. Walk it in late August and the heather turns the whole plateau pu...

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Image: Peter Van Osta | CC BY-SA 3.0

Campine: A Region That Still Sings of Itself

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul Hermans, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1966 the Flemish singer Louis Neefs released M'n dorp in de Kempen, My Village in the Campine, and it became something close to a regional hymn. The song is sentimental, but the sentiment is earned: this is a place where people remember being from somewhere small, and where th...

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Image: Paul Hermans | CC BY-SA 4.0