Municipalities of Belgium

Municipalities Of Belgium

Belgium comprises 589 municipalities (Dutch: gemeenten, French: communes, German: Gemeinde) grouped into five provinces in each of two regions and into a third region, the Brussels-Capital Region, comprising 19 municipalities that do not belong to a province. In most cases, the municipalities are the smallest administrative subdivisions of Belgium, but in municipalities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, on initiative of the local council, sub-municipal administrative entities with elected councils may be created. As such, only Antwerp, having over 460,000 inhabitants, became subdivided into nine districts (Dutch: districten). The Belgian arrondissements (also in French as well as in Dutch), an administrative level between province (or the capital region) and municipality, or the lowest judicial level, are in English sometimes called districts as well.