Schaerbeek occupies a sliver of high ground in the north-eastern part of the Brussels-Capital Region - 7.9 square kilometres holding more than 130,000 people, which makes it twice as dense as the Brussels average. The name itself is older than Belgium. A 1120 legal document mentions Scarenbecca, granting administration of the local church to canons from Soignies, far to the south in what is now Hainaut. The word probably comes from Old Dutch: schaer for notch or score, beek for creek - a place where a stream had cut its mark. For most of the next eight hundred years, that creek and the gentle slopes around it grew vegetables, grapes, and the sour cherries that became Schaerbeek's identity. By 1540 the village counted 112 houses and 600 inhabitants. The donkeys came later, in the era when the cherry harvest had to walk itself to market.

On 18 May 2003, during the Belgian federal election, a candidate in Schaerbeek picked up 4,096 unexplained extra votes. An inquiry followed. The number was suspicious in a way that engineers immediately recognised: 4,096 is exactly two to the twelfth power, the kind of value that appears when a single bit flips in computer memory. The investigators concluded that an ionising particle - most likely a cosmic ray - had struck a memory cell in one of the electronic voting machines and flipped a zero to a one in precisely the right register. It remains the most widely cited case of a suspected cosmic-ray single-event upset affecting an election tally, though the cosmic ray explanation - the likeliest after all other causes were ruled out - was never definitively confirmed. The candidate did not win the seat. The machines were retired.

The commune has a fault line, and everyone who lives there knows it. The eastern part - around Square Vergote, the Diamant Quarter, Josaphat Park - is leafy and affluent, with Belle Epoque townhouses and easy access to the EU quarter and NATO headquarters. The western part, near Brussels-North station and the Chaussee de Haecht, is where Brussels's Turkish community settled in the 1960s and 70s, drawn from Afyon and Emirdag and a handful of other Anatolian towns. They called the streets around St Mary's Royal Church Little Anatolia. The bakeries sell simit and acma; the restaurants serve lahmacun until late; the Albanian and Moroccan communities have layered in alongside. The mayor at the time of the 2016 attacks, Bernard Clerfayt, pushed back hard against any comparison with neighbouring Molenbeek, arguing that Schaerbeek's diversity - 52 percent of residents trace ancestry to non-European countries, 21 percent to non-Belgian Europe - made any single ghetto narrative impossible to sustain.

Schaerbeek is one of the great Art Nouveau commune of Brussels, but the buildings hide. The Autrique House on Chaussee de Haecht - now a small museum - was Victor Horta's very first private commission, built in 1893 for an engineer friend. Walk past it on the wrong side of the street and you miss it entirely. The Maison Cauchie, just over the border in Etterbeek, is closer to the Cinquantenaire, but the streets around Square Ambiorix and Square Marie-Louise hold dozens of facades by Strauven, Hankar, and lesser-known masters of the same generation. The Municipal Hall on Place Colignon is something else: a neo-Flemish Renaissance pile that King Leopold II inaugurated in 1887. The original burned down in 1911 and was rebuilt larger. Inside, a young dramatist named Michel de Ghelderode worked as an archivist from 1923 to 1946, writing the surreal, blood-soaked plays that made him one of the great avant-garde figures of Belgian theatre, while quietly filing municipal correspondence in the room next door.

Schaerbeek railway station, built in a fanciful Flemish Renaissance style, has been one of Brussels's working freight and passenger yards since 1887. In 2015 it became home to Train World, the national railway museum, where some of the oldest surviving locomotives in continental Europe are kept under cover. The commune has also produced an unusual density of public figures: Jacques Brel grew up here before he ever sang a word. Rene Magritte spent his last decades on the rue des Mimosas, painting bowler hats and pipes in a quiet ground-floor flat. Paul-Henri Spaak, one of the founding fathers of the European Union and a Secretary General of NATO, was born here in 1899, half a century before either institution existed. The actress Virginie Efira grew up here too. The Brusilia tower, rising 102 metres above Josaphat Park, remains the tallest residential building in Belgium - a single inadvertent skyscraper in a commune that otherwise stays close to the ground.