Along the banks of the Rupel, the landscape is stained red by its past. For generations, clay was extracted and fired here to produce the region’s famous Rupel bricks. At Brik Boom, the visitor centre of the clay region, this story comes to life. Not just through displays and text, but with images, sounds, scents, and voices.
You’ll experience the rhythm of a working day in the brickworks, learn how clay shaped the landscape, and see how generations of workers built their lives from the ground up, quite literally. Brik Boom is not a nostalgic museum, but a place where history still smoulders, quite literally, in the kilns of the landscape.
Brik Boom tells the story of the deep connection between soil, people, and landscape in the Rupel region. The area's rich clay deposits were formed over millions of years by sediment from seas and rivers. This geological wealth laid the foundation for an intense brickmaking culture that permanently reshaped the landscape. What was once nature became industry. What was once an abandoned industry has now returned to nature. At Brik Boom, you’ll see that the interaction between people and the Earth never truly ends. And that’s precisely what makes this a true Geopark location.