The Church of Our Lady of the Sablon is a church building in the Belgian capital of Brussels on the Sablon. Although the church never got a tower due to lack of funds, it is characteristic of the late Gothic style with its many flame-shaped elements and striking 14m high stained glass windows.
The Sablon was once a large deserted plain, interspersed with watery areas, grasslands and sand. A hermit lived there and in the thirteenth century the Saint John's Hospital buried the dead there for whom there was no room left in its own small cemetery.
Shortly after the year 1300, the Saint John's Hospital donated the relevant piece of land on the sandy hill to the Great Guild of Crossbowmen to build a chapel in honour of the Holy Mary. The founding legend tells us that a pious woman, Beatrijs Soetkens, brought a miraculous statue of Our Lady by boat from Antwerp to Brussels in 1348. In Brussels, Duke John III of Brabant awaited the statue, as depicted today on a wooden bas-relief on the first column in the nave. Every year since then, the crossbowmen have carried the statue in procession around the church, which is the origin of the prestigious Brussels Ommegang procession that goes from the Sablon to the Grand Place every year.
Houses were lined up in the immediate vicinity of the chapel and around the pool in the middle of the Grand Sablon. In the fifteenth century, the district was considerably expanded. In 1470, Duke Charles the Bold ordered the Court of Audit to build a street between his palace on the Coudenberg and the church. When Princess Mary was baptized in 1505, the procession no longer followed the old route to the Saint Gudula Church, but to the Our Lady of the Sablon. Margaret of Austria practiced her devotional activities there. In 1530, she initiated the great July Procession. These proofs of princely favour guaranteed the continued prosperity of the Zavel district and the adjacent Wolweide (the current Wolstraat), which extended to the slope of the Galgenberg, where much later the current Palace of Justice was built.
In 1898, during a thorough restoration, the buildings that had been built against the church were demolished.