Qualla: Hasselt

Hasselt: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 1 December 1601, the Archdukes Albert and Isabella, who ruled the Spanish Netherlands from Brussels, banned the sale and production of jenever - the juniper-flavored grain spirit that would later become known to the rest of the world as gin. Hasselt smiled and kept distilling. The city was technically not part of the Spanish Netherlands at all; it belonged to the Prince-Bishopric of Liege, an ecclesiastical principality with its own laws, and the archducal decree simply did not apply there. For the next two centuries Hasselt's distilleries flourished while their Brabant and Flemish competitors were strangled by regulation. By the 19th century, jenever was the most important industry in all of Belgian Limburg - and almost every distillery was here.

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Hasselt: Hazel by the Demer

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The name comes from the Germanic word Hasaluth, meaning a place of hazel trees. The town was founded around the 7th century on the Helbeek, a tributary of the Demer river, and first appeared in a document in 1165. In 1232 Arnold IV, Count of Loon, gave Hasselt the same freedoms t...

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Hasselt: Capital of taste

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The city sells itself as the Capital of Taste, and the case is well-made. The National Jenever Museum occupies a former distillery; on the third weekend of every October, the Hasselt Jenever Festival fills the streets, the Borrelmanneke fountain on Maastrichterstraat is temporari...

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Hasselt: Where the cassette was born

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1963, a team of Belgian and Dutch engineers led by Lou Ottens at the Philips factory in Hasselt invented the Compact Cassette and its accompanying recorder. The format conquered the world for the next three decades - in living rooms, in cars, in personal stereos, in the mixtap...

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Hasselt: The free-bus experiment

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1997 Hasselt did something no other Belgian city had ever tried: it made every municipal bus free. Within nine years, public transport usage had risen by between 800 and 900 percent over pre-zero-fare levels. People who had owned cars left them at home; people who could not af...

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Hasselt: Where Verstappen learned to drive

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Max Verstappen was born in Hasselt on 30 September 1997 - son of a Dutch Formula One driver and a Belgian karting champion, raised in a household where the kitchen table doubled as a race strategy room. He went on to win four consecutive Formula One World Drivers' Championships b...

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