The beguinages in Bruges and Ghent operate under different setups. To investigate in person, I hoped to travel by train to both cities and back to Antwerp, and I was pleased to learn from the ticket agent this could be done for the amazingly low price of 11.5 euros, or $18.29 at $1.59 to the euro.

Image The courtyard of the beguinage De Wijngaard (The Vineyard) in Bruges. Credit... Herman Wouters for The New York Times

It took about 45 minutes to get to Bruges, and then 20 minutes more to walk to the front gate of De Wijngaard (The Vineyard), as this beguinage is called. The walk along the canals and through winding passageways was its own reward, and it was early enough in the season that the streets were not yet choked with tourists.

As with so many other places in this most popular of Belgium’s medieval destinations, the Bruges beguinage seems to exist to be photographed more than anything else. Hundreds of visitors take out their cameras for the same shots — of the whitewashed buildings and courtyard of poplars and daffodils — every day. I know I did.

Since 1937 it has been a monastery for a small group of Benedictine nuns. About 25 sisters still live there. (Winston Churchill included them in an affectionate painting he did of the place in 1946.) Ordinarily, I would counsel skipping the little museum, with its slipshod displays of lace-making done by the sisters, along with the re-creation of an early-20th-century kitchen. But the 2 euro entrance fee is one of the few sources of income asked from the crowds that otherwise troop over the stone bridge and through the 18th-century gateway free. I paid up and after a cursory tour headed for the exit.

Not to be missed is the nearby Baroque church, an unflamboyant structure that remains the focus of the community. A painting over the altar of St. Elizabeth, patroness of the beguinage, by the 17th-century Bruges master Jacob van Oost the Elder, may be the art history highlight. Worthier of study and contemplation are the dozens of tombstones embedded in the floor under the benches and near the entrance of the nave. The dwindling ranks of the beguines can be charted in the centuries of women who spent their lives here, now mostly forgotten by history. The last person to be buried under these stone slabs died in 1905.

The beguinages were experiments in communal living that worked successfully for centuries. But as the options for many European women multiplied after the 18th century, within the Catholic Church and beyond, the numbers of beguines rapidly declined. Belgium, which once had 94 beguinages, had only 20 in 1856; the members of the sisterhood fell by more than half between 1631 and 1828. Today, according to the Tourist Office of Flanders, Belgium, the order has only one surviving member, 88-year-old Sister Marcella who lives in a Belgian rest home.

Of the three beguinages left in Ghent I had time to visit only two. The Klein Begijnhof (Little Beguinage) in the southwest quadrant of the city had been described to me as perhaps the most atmospheric of its kind in Belgium. This was true only in that it was the saddest I saw. Vandals had broken windows in the apartments, and the church door was padlocked. An air of abandonment prevailed in a once prosperous setting that catered to indigent and lower-middle-class women. Restorations are supposed to be under way.