Drinking water fountains in Brussels

Open the free Fontavio app and tap Closest: it points a compass needle at the nearest one, with a distance and a walking estimate, and hands the location to the maps app on your phone when you want directions.

Nearly all of them. Price is shown per place, so you can check before you rely on one, since a handful of fill-up points do charge.

The app checks opening hours and seasonal dates against your phone’s clock, and there is an open now filter. A place with no hours on record shows hours unknown, which for an outdoor tap usually means there is nothing to close.

Some of them. A fountain built for drinking from directly is often awkward for anything bigger, while a fill-up tap is meant for a bottle, a jerrycan or a tank. The listing says which kind a place is, and campervan and boat fill-up points are on the same map.

Treat the list as a good starting point, not a guarantee. A place shows a drinking water badge when the source data or a contributor said it is fit to drink; nobody inspects these taps for us and none of this water is lab-tested. Check the spout and let the water run clear before you fill a bottle.

Many outdoor taps and fountains in colder places are shut off over winter and turned back on in spring. Where a place has known seasonal dates or opening hours, its listing shows them, so a fountain that is off until April says so instead of sending you across town.

Yes, and they are some of the least documented water in any city. A cemetery or allotment tap is often the only free water in a residential district, and it appears here once somebody adds it.

A contributor confirmed recently that the place still matches what is listed. Unverified means nobody has yet, and might be outdated means it has been long enough to be worth a second look. The badge moves whenever somebody in Brussels confirms a tap, which is a single tap in the app.

No map of a city is ever finished. New taps get added and old ones get confirmed as people use them, and a thin area fills in fastest when somebody who lives there starts adding what they walk past.

Report the one that moved from the app, and add the missing one yourself: only the location and the category are required, and anyone can fill in the rest later. A person reviews what you send, and water-safety reports are looked at first.

Yes. WHO and UNICEF put safely managed drinking water in Belgium at 99.5% for 2024. In Brussels, the regional environment agency says tap water often matches bottled water for quality, at around a 130th of the price. Figures, sources and the dates they were checked: https://fontavio.com/belgium/tap-water/

Not necessarily. How good a public tap is depends on the pipes of the building or park it's in and on how often it's cleaned. Water in a tap that hasn't been used for a while has been standing in the pipe, and a tap in a courtyard or garden may be there for watering plants. Run the tap for a few seconds and check the spout is clean. When you find a good one, put it on Fontavio or review it, so the next person out for the day with an empty bottle knows where to fill up.