Ypres, West Flanders Province, The Flemish Region, Belgium

🇧🇪 Ypres is a Belgian city and municipality in the province of West Flanders. Though the Dutch name Ieper is the official one, the city's French name Ypres is most commonly used in English. The municipality comprises the city of Ypres/Ieper and the villages of Boezinge, Brielen, Dikkebus, Elverdinge, Hollebeke, Sint-Jan, Vlamertinge, Voormezele, Zillebeke, and Zuidschote.

During the First World War, Ypres (or "Wipers" as it was commonly known by the British troops) was the centre of the Battles of Ypres between German and Allied forces.

After the war the town was extensively rebuilt using money paid by Germany in reparations, with the main square, including the Cloth Hall and town hall, being rebuilt as close to the original designs as possible (the rest of the rebuilt town is more modern in appearance). The Cloth Hall today is home to In Flanders Fields Museum, dedicated to Ypres's role in the First World War and named for the poem by John McCrae.

Ypres is a small city in the very western part of Belgium, the so-called Westhoek. Ypres these days has the title of "city of peace" and maintains a close friendship with another town on which war had a profound impact: Hiroshima. Both towns witnessed warfare at its worst: Ypres was one of the first places where chemical warfare was employed, while Hiroshima suffered the debut of nuclear warfare. The city governments of Ypres and Hiroshima advocate that cities should never be targets again and campaign[example needed] for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Ypres hosts the international campaign secretariat of Mayors for Peace, an international Mayoral organisation mobilising cities and citizens world-wide to abolish and eliminate nuclear weapons by 2020.

Economy Though Ypres is an historic city, and generates significant income from tourism, it also has a number of industrial areas. The biggest one is along the Ieperlee canal, which hosts room for around 120 companies and a wind farm in the north of Ypres.

The office area known as Ieper Business Park is connected to the industrial area. That office area started as the site of speech recognition company Lernout & Hauspie, and was named "Flanders Language Valley" (mimicking Silicon Valley), until the company went bankrupt. Since then, the office area had many difficult years, where a big share of the offices were unused. However, those years are mostly over, and currently, the area offers about 1000 employees a job.

Then there are also various other, smaller industrial areas like the area around Picanol in the south of Ypres.

Transport Ieper railway station run by NMBS has hourly trains to Kortrijk.

It can also be accessed from Brussels, linking to Eurostar, and takes about 75 minutes with two stops.