Ixelles Ponds

The Ixelles Ponds or Elsene Ponds are two freshwater ponds in the Brussels municipality of Ixelles, Belgium. The ponds we can see today are those spared by a 19th-century campaign of drying the wetlands of the Maalbeek valley between La Cambre Abbey and the Place Eugène Flagey.The two long and narrow ponds, whose total lengths are approximately 700 metres , and widths are approximately 50 metres , are aligned on a roughly North–South axis and are separated by a narrow strip of land. With the surrounding park, the Ixelles Ponds are the tip of a long strip of almost uninterrupted greenery reaching all the way from the Sonian Forest deep into Brussels' urban tissue.