Menen

The Leie is the most beautiful river in Flanders and the most glorious as well. This is how poet Karel van de Woestijne described THE GOLDEN RIVER at the beginning of the 20th century. This was just one of the superlatives attributed to the Leie, due to the 'gold' - (colorful and productive) yellow flax that used to rot there for weeks on end.

The 202 km long river springs forth as 'la Lys' in France, in the northern hills of Artois near the village of Lisbourg (west of Béthune). For almost 30 km, the still young river forms the French-Belgian border and then enters our country at Menen. The Leie flows along Kortrijk and Deinze to Ghent, where it empties into the Scheldt. Following several severe floods in 1965 and 1966, almost the entire Belgian course was canalized, resulting in no less than 25 river meanders being cut off ...

A drastic intervention in the beauty of the landscape that also negatively affected the natural self-cleaning ability of the originally highly meandering watercourse. But this also led to the numerous beautiful nature reserves along the cut-off old river arms.

Brackie