Public city & port tour per Vespa

180 minutes | € 145 per Vespa, each Vespa seats 1 or 2 persons
Drinks included.

Meet your guide beside Antwerp’s leafy Stadspark, where your gleaming Vespas await. After fitting helmets and outlining convoy signals, the guide leads you down a calm side street for a quick throttle-and-brake warm-up, sharing pro tips picked up from years of port scooter runs. Confidence set, you weave past gabled guild houses and hidden courtyards toward the Scheldt, feeling the city’s centuries unfold at scooter speed.

Safety Spin & Old-Town Glide

1: Stadspark Start-Up

Your guide will provide you with a mono headphone with a radio receiver, so you can hear him clearly over the roaring Vespa engine. This is lightweight, fit all head sizes, and has its own volume control. We recommend to not wear any earrings, as they can make this earpiece uncomfortable.

Even though this audio kit is one-way only, you are free to ask your guide any questions during the many stops we do: we welcome all interaction!

So you can hear your guide crystal clear throughout the tour

2: Audio-kit handout

Your guide stops beside the Museum aan de Stroom’s striking terracotta tower and leads you to the riverside promenade. From this lookout you get a first real look into the impressive history of our port, pointing out past challenges, distant crane forests, the world-record Kieldrecht Lock, and hidden chemical towers. It’s a vivid, storyteller’s briefing that transforms the city-to-port journey ahead into a narrative you’ll follow in real time.

Where it all began

3: Panoramic Prelude at MAS

Cruising the old quays of Het Eilandje, we drive by towering iron cranes, silent sentinels of Antwerp’s sail-to-steam heyday, and points out their once-revolutionary gearwork as if opening a time capsule. At the red-brick Red Star Line Museum, they recount how millions boarded steamers here for New York, punctuating the tale with insider tidbits about cargo stowage, steerage life, and dockworker lore.

Het Eilandje & Red Star Line

4: Historic Docklands

We disembark at a quiet pier opposite the shimmering Havenhuis, its diamond-glass hull seemingly afloat atop a 19th-century fire station. Framed by the adjacent dry docks, now being transformed into the city’s Maritime Museum, the spot is catnip for photographers. Your guide decodes Hadid’s design choices and shares insider gossip on how the new museum will breathe life into these granite basins.

Zaha Hadid Meets Historic Dry Docks

5: Havenhuis Vantage

As we glide past the tiny 15th-century Oosterweel church, your guide draws your eye to the colossal construction yard right beside it—the Oosterweel works, currently Europe’s biggest wharf, where tunnel segments for Antwerp’s long-awaited Ring closure are being cast. In a few animated sentences, they connect the dots between medieval river parishes, post-war port expansion, and today’s multi-billion-euro infrastructure overhaul.

Medieval Spire vs. Europe’s Largest Wharf

6: Oosterweel Contrast

Parking beside the towering white granulate silos of Belgian giant Katoen Natie, your guide explains how this family firm turned plastics handling into a data-driven art, using automated silos, on-site rail spurs, and real-time cargo tracing to shave hours off supply chains. En-route you’ve cruised past eye-catching freight: rainforest timber trunks, oversize turbine blades, even artfully shrink-wrapped machinery. The stop reveals how such diverse cargoes funnel smoothly through one brilliantly engineered hub.

Smart Logistics in Action

7: Katoen Natie Silos

Throttle onto the sweeping Noordkasteelbrug and feel the vista open up: to the west the Scheldt glitters next to petrochemical giants, while to the east tank farms and wind turbines line the horizon. Your guide slows the convoy for a safe rolling commentary, pointing out the diverse skyline, the distant Doel nuclear towers, and the tracery of pipelines that knit the port together. A rider-eye postcard that frames everything you’ll explore next.

Panorama on the Move

8: Noordkasteel Bridge Crossing

You roll into the heritage docks where Europe’s largest timber stacks and chilled fruit sheds still rule. Depending on the day’s unload, the air may carry sweet banana and fresh-cut pine as forklifts zip between weathered warehouses. Crossing the wrought-iron "Wip-bruggen" bascule bridges, mechanical jewels from a bygone boom, your guide recounts how these quays once bustled with sailing ships and stevedores, stitching Antwerp to tropic plantations and Baltic forests.

Scents of a Century-Old Port

9: Timber-&-Fruit Quays

Your guide guides you through a maze of multicoloured container stacks—steel towers so close you can read the box seals. On one side loom house-sized granite blocks awaiting export; on the other, refrigerated “reefer” racks hiss around Europe’s largest fruit terminal, ripe bananas and citrus moving from ship to supermarket in hours.

Granite Giants & Europe’s Fruit Gateway

10: Container Canyon

In this café, they offer 7 different types of glasses for the same beer called Stella. Dockers can be very particular about it! In this authentic café they enjoy their beer in their preferred glass a the same counter where CEO's stand as well, a testimony to the unique port mentality that is present here. You can enjoy any drink you want here, it's included in the price, before we head back to town.

At the only remaining dockers café

11: Drinks!