Finally, in the last 10 years, free- thinking curators have brought two major contemporary arts festivals to Bruges, and now they have launched the third: Brugge Centraal, an ambitious and clear evolution in the small city's reinvention of itself as a natural home for the avant-garde.

"Bruges is a ‘cute' city," laughs Filip Strobbe, director of the festival. "It's kind of a decor, with an historic atmosphere. You don't have a very urban feel here. Contemporary art is usually shown in very urban settings, so it's always an interesting conversation between this historical context and contemporary art".

That in fact makes Bruges rather unique in Flanders - it's adherence to an "old world" atmosphere might have something to do with the three million tourists a year, but it also offers a distinctly mediaeval mood for contemporary artists to work with - city wide.

One of the festival's cornerstones is the exhibition Luc Tuymans: A Vision of Central Europe, which is staged in venues across Bruges, including the attic of a mediaeval hospital and a 17th-century seminary, both normally closed to the public. The title implies that it's a show of work by Tuymans, one of Belgium's most famous artists but, in fact, though a few of his works are part of the show, he served mostly as curator.

The title Brugge Centraal combines the city's name with Central Europe, and the festival is devoted to those countries that used to be part of Eastern Europe before the end of the Cold War. Now that two decades have passed, art is flowing much more easily from east to west, and Tuymans has chosen a representative selection of work by his contemporaries, including the famous Polish painter and sculptor Miroslaw Balka and Czech-born installation artist Pavel Büchler.

"This festival shows how contemporary the art and culture is in Central Europe and has always been," says Strobbe. "In the 1920s, the avant-garde art of Poland was really one of the most important in the arts scene. There has been a lively tradition there, which has been behind the curtain, literally, since the Second World War."

The festival's other cornerstone exhibition is Van Eyck to Dürer, covering the influence of the Flemish Primitives on the artists of the Holy Roman Empire. Aside from the most obvious effect on the arts world - inventing oil painting on canvas - the Primitives of the 15th century had a great influence on realist style, altering the history of painting ever after. Brugge Centraal brings back Flemish masterpieces from museums abroad, pairing them with works by Central European artists of the same period, and often from the same region, to illustrate the cross-pollination of style and subject.

The festival also showcases photography, music and street theatre, much of it in public space. Don't miss, for instance, designs painted around the city by American Brody Neuenschwander, whose time spent enmeshed in Germany art history sent him down the path to becoming the world's most famous calligrapher.

Until 10 January
Across Bruges
www.bruggecentraal.be