On the morning of 8 August 1956, a fire broke out in the Bois du Cazier coal mine in Marcinelle, near Charleroi, after a mechanical error in the shaft loaded a lift cage with a wagon and cut an oil pipe and electric cables. Smoke filled the galleries within minutes. Two hundred and sixty-two miners died, and only thirteen were rescued. Most of the dead were immigrants, and one hundred and thirty-six of them were Italian, men who had come to Belgium under a 1946 agreement that exchanged Italian labour for Belgian coal. The disaster remains a deep wound in Belgian and Italian memory, and it changed mining safety rules across Europe.
Today, the site is a museum and memorial, part of the UNESCO listing for the Major Mining Sites of Wallonia. The old buildings, the headframe, the sorting plant and the coking works stand as they were, and a memorial to the victims with their names is moving in its simplicity. The museum covers the history of mining, the lives of the miners and the story of the disaster. It also includes a glass museum, which gives a lighter touch of industrial heritage. A visit takes two or three hours and leaves you thoughtful.
The landscape around Charleroi is a surprise. For two centuries this was the Black Country of Belgium, with coal, steel and glass works, and it has the scars to show it. The terrils, the slag heaps, have become green hills covered in birch, and the old canals and railways have been turned into cycling and walking routes, the RAVeL network. Riding here is a mixture of urban streets, motorways and quiet roads through a patchwork of villages and woods. The cobbled sections can be rough, and rain makes them slippery, and the traffic around Charleroi's ring road is heavy at rush hours.
Charleroi has fuel at many stations, and Chatelet, a few kilometres away, has the same. The city is better than its reputation, with a lively art scene and good places to eat, and its Belgian beer and frites are as good as anywhere. Not far away, the Neolithic flint mines of Spiennes, near Mons, are another UNESCO site, and a dramatic reminder that people have been digging underground here for six thousand years.