Ypres Travel Guide

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The small town of Ypres (Ieper) sits in a corner of Belgium often painted in the most sombre of tones. It is, after all, the town right at the centre of the whirlwind that the Great War visited upon Flanders. And literally wiped off the map by four years of shelling and trench warfare. From 1914-1918, Ypres saw the unleashing of the horrors chemical warfare, and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of British, German, French and Belgian soldiers, in the relentless battles of the Ypres 'Salient'. So if you come to visit Ypres, you inevitably come with a due respect for the weight of history that has pressed so hard on this unfortunate Flemish city. And in fact, many visitors' journeys owe themselves to precisely that ill-fortune: innumerable family trees, whether traced from Britain, Canada or New Zealand, track back