Turnhout

Turnhout deals the world its cards. The capital of the Kempen has been printing playing cards since the early nineteenth century, and today Cartamundi — headquartered here, its museum installed in a former card factory — is the largest playing-card maker on earth: the odds are excellent that the deck in any drawer, on any continent, was born in Turnhout. The National Playing Card Museum shuffles the history, presses and all.

The town's older treasures are quieter. The moated castle of the Dukes of Brabant, foursquare in its pond, now houses the courts — justice in a fairy tale — and the beguinage, one of the thirteen Flemish beguinages inscribed by UNESCO, keeps its whitewashed lanes and little baroque church in ordered peace. Turnhout's civic pride runs to print in general: the city was long a graphics capital, and its industrial heritage is one of type, ink and paper.

Cultural life gathers at De Warande, the cultural centre whose halls and theatre make it the Kempen's principal stage — listed in the concert record under the abbreviation "Cult. Cen. De Warande", flagged for the workbook — with a programme that runs from classical seasons to jazz and contemporary work. A castle in the water, nuns' lanes in the quiet, and four suits in every language: Turnhout plays a strong hand modestly.