Koksijde Beach Cabins

Around 1780, an English innkeeper (by some accounts a former sea captain) introduced horse-drawn bathing cabins to the Belgian coast, wooden huts on giant wheels that were pulled to the tideline so ladies could change clothes away from immodest glances. A coachman would clap his whip on the roof as a signal that the coast was clear. Nearly 250 years later, the wheels have come off, but the tradition endures: numbered beach cabins still dot Koksijde’s shores, available for rent from May to September.

The beach itself sits on more history than the cabins suggest. Beneath the dunes lie the ruins of Ten Duinen Abbey, a Cistercian monastery founded in 1107 that was gradually swallowed by drifting sand over the centuries and not properly excavated until 1897, work that continued into the 20th century and eventually uncovered its church and more than a thousand graves. Six centuries after the monks lost their abbey to the dunes, the same coastline took on a very different role: during WWII, the German Luftwaffe built an airfield just outside town, and remnants of the Atlantic Wall, including an old observation bunker, still sit near the beach today, a stretch of Belgium’s roughly 65-kilometer coast where a monastery, a military occupation, and a wheeled changing hut all left their mark within a few hundred meters of sand.