Qualla: Sonian Forest

Sonian Forest: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Walk a half-kilometre past the southeastern tram stops of Brussels and the city goes quiet in a way modern cities rarely allow. The Sonian Forest does not feel like a city park. It feels like something the city did not quite manage to clear. The 4,421-hectare canopy of European beech and oak that begins almost at the door of the Bois de la Cambre is a surviving scrap of the *Silva Carbonaria*, the Charcoal Forest the Romans called *Arduenna Silva* — a wood that once swept across most of Brabant. In 2017 UNESCO inscribed parts of the Sonian as Belgium's only contribution to the multinational World Heritage Site *Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and Other Regions of Europe*. The recognition is for what the trees can still teach about how European forests have worked since the last ice age, and for trees that are still doing it, two centuries old, beside a metro line.

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Sonian Forest: A Forest That Crosses Borders

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Belgium is famously a country of three regions, and the Sonian Forest is the rare place that sits in all of them at once. It belongs to Flemish municipalities — Sint-Genesius-Rode, Hoeilaart, Overijse, Tervuren — and to the Brussels-Capital municipalities of Uccle, Watermael-Boit...

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Sonian Forest: What Was Cut, What Remains

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At the start of the 19th century, the forest still covered about 25,000 acres. By 1830 it had been reduced to roughly 11,200. Napoleon contributed to that loss in spectacular fashion when he ordered 22,000 oaks felled to build the Boulogne flotilla, the invasion fleet he intended...

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Sonian Forest: Bats, Boars, and a Bridge for Animals

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The fauna has thinned over the centuries. The forest once held 46 mammal species; seven have disappeared — the brown bear since about 1000, the wolf since around 1810, the hazel dormouse since 1842, the red deer, the badger, the hare, and the wild boar, which was thought extinct ...

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Sonian Forest: Mystics, Memorials, and Birch Trees

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The forest has always attracted people who wanted to think clearly. John of Ruysbroeck, the great Flemish mystic, founded his monastery at Vauvert near Groenendaal here in the 14th century. Cistercian, Benedictine, and Dominican women's communities all settled in the wood over th...

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