How did a 400-year-old Belgian village now threatened with demolition become a magnet for the world's best street artists? Doel's last 25 residents explain why they're fighting for their extraordinary town

It's noon in a cafe in a small Belgian town. People are eating sandwiches, popping in for a chat or to read the paper. So far, so normal. But the view from the window tells a different story. The cafe overlooks a square full of boarded-up shops and homes. Graffiti covers almost every available surface, including a forlorn children's playground. In the neighbouring streets, row upon row of vacant and abandoned houses are covered in eye-poppingly colourful doodles or large murals by street artists. To add to the dystopian feel of the place, every so often a large pile of rubble shows the spot where a house once stood, and the giant smoke-billowing cooling towers of Belgium's first commercial nuclear-power station loom on one side.

This is Doel, a 400-year-old village north-west of Antwerp that has been at the heart of a political battle for survival for over two decades. A state-funded corporation is seeking to raze it to make way for the land-hungry port of Antwerp. But members of the ever-dwindling local populace are fighting to keep their homes and the village alive. They say a second container dock isn't necessary since the previous one, which opened in 2005, is being used to less than a fifth of its capacity (the corporation disputes this figure). What's more, they argue, the riverside village has lush nature, culture and heritage in abundance – plus the first stone-mill in Belgium and a listed early 17th-century house that belonged to Peter Paul Rubens's family.

A street sign reminding visitors to Doel to respect the residents

From a population of around 1,300 in the early 70s, there are now only 25 inhabitants left. But they are a brave and well-organised bunch. A 52-year-old named Marina Apers is their unlikely champion. She lives in a house emblazoned with banners announcing that she and her husband will "leave Doel over our dead bodies". "Every time the government succeed in something, we start legal procedures against them – and mostly, we win," she says. So far, the EU's strict environmental laws have been on the villagers' side: Doel is, among other things, home to one of Europe's largest swallow colonies.

Apers moved here in 1991 after being employed as a cleaner at the nuclear power station. She and her husband, Guido, were assured that buying there was a safe bet, but after they renovated their home, rumours started to surface that Doel "was going to have to disappear".

The decline hasn't happened overnight, though the majority of inhabitants left just before 2000 when they were offered cash premiums to sell up voluntarily. "They threatened that if people didn't do that they would be expropriated," she says, "and if you are expropriated, you get very little money."

A mural on an abandoned house by the Belgian street artist ROA

By 2007 there were 350 people left and squatters had started to move in, making some of the deserted houses habitable again. That year, Apers helped set up the campaigning group Doel 2020. One of the ways it planned to ensure the long-term survival of Doel was to turn it into a haven for artists.

"In the beginning it was good. The idea was that it would become an open-air museum," she says. World-renowned artists such as Luc Tuymans and Michelangelo Pistoletto took part. Soon the village attracted street artists from across Belgium and abroad who left their mark.

"In the early days the murals related to the message the residents had, which was 'don't take our village away'," says the Brussels-based photojournalist Virginia Mayo, who has been visiting Doel since 1998. "But later, other artists came and just used all the buildings as wall canvases for their work, probably because there was little police presence."

Of all the street art adorning Doel's abandoned walls, it is the internationally famous Belgian muralist ROA's haunting oversized rat, crow, headless boar and upside-down rabbit that have become the village's most memorable. But other well-known street artists from Belgium, Holland and France have also left a trail of weird and wonderful cartoon-like figures – a moody mural of Barack Obama as the Joker by Amsterdam's Ives.One and some robot aliens by the Brussels-based artist Resto are notable examples.

A creation by Psoman

It's a surreal place, strewn with hundreds of abandoned buildings, including schools, petrol stations and a now-silent town hall, and the constant hum of high-voltage power lines intensifies the post-apocalyptic atmosphere. Some houses still have furniture and toys lying around in rooms and gardens. As Mayo writes in her book of photos of the village: "Doel feels like Chernobyl without the accident."

Against its will the place has become a tourist attraction, with thousands of urban-decay enthusiasts, photographers and tourists visiting every year. Some don't even get out of their cars, choosing instead to drive down the empty streets, windows open, camera phones aloft. The waitress at the cafe says her customers are chiefly employees from the nuclear plant and the hordes of tourists. "People come here because it's so bizarre," she says.

A few buildings have remained free of graffiti, including the 11 homes still in private hands, the church, the cemetery and the house once belonging to Rubens's family, which the corporation has promised will be dismantled and rebuilt brick by brick in a neighbouring town.

Work by an unknown artist in Doel

Signs stating that Doel is inhabited are intended to encourage good behaviour, but as Mayo says, "respect for the town has diminished and for some it has became just derelict rather than a curiosity". Vandalism and looting is commonplace, agrees Apers, as are illegal raves in the village's dilapidated barns, despite stepped-up police patrols and neighbourhood watch schemes. "Last night I got to sleep at 2am because I could hear people racing down the streets in their cars," she says. Another of Doel's remaining inhabitants, the larger-than-life 80-year-old Emilienne Driesen, has lived in the village all her life and is now the only resident on her road. She keeps her home in excellent condition yet, poignantly, has had to put a sign in her window reminding passersby that dit huis is bewoond ("this house is inhabited"). At night she takes sleeping and anti-anxiety pills to block out the noise of vandals, but is adamant she will never leave.

The Doel 2020 activists and remaining inhabitants are acutely aware that this widespread destruction and deterioration only strengthens the port's case. "They have done it on purpose," says Apers, who refers to it as 'demolition politics'. "There are over 400 families who would like to come and live here because they work nearby." But the corporation argues that Doel is unsafe and uninhabitable. How much longer Apers and her fellow campaigners can hold out is unclear, but their fighting spirit remains. Whether the town survives or not, it is unlikely the murals will. They stand as transient artefacts in a town whose fate is utterly in limbo.

• Travel was provided by Visit Flanders.

• This article was amended on 9 June. It originally stated that the village of Doel was 700 years old. Though the area was inhabited beforehand it was not a proper village until the 17th century. This has been changed.