Brussels South Charleroi Airport — Charleroi, Belgium

Brussels South Charleroi Airport, familiar to budget travelers as CRL, sits roughly fifty kilometers south of the Belgian capital near the former industrial city of Charleroi in Wallonia. Ryanair built a major base here starting in the early 2000s, transforming what had been a sleepy regional airfield into one of Belgium's busiest airports by passenger count despite its distance from downtown Brussels. Shuttle buses ferry arriving travelers into the city center, a trade-off many low-fare passengers accept in exchange for cheaper tickets. The airport's rapid growth mirrored a broader European trend of secondary airports thriving on point-to-point discount routes rather than traditional hub-and-spoke traffic. Charleroi's own industrial heritage, rooted in coal and steel production that declined through the late twentieth century, contrasts with the airport's modern role as an economic bright spot, generating jobs in logistics, retail, and tourism for a region that had struggled economically for decades.