The Sonian Forest or Sonian Wood (, , ) is a forest at the southeast edge of Brussels, Belgium. The Sonian Forest was a favorite hunting ground of the Habsburg Imperial family, and as such features prominently in some famous Renaissance works of art such as the Hunts of Maximilian tapestries in the Louvre. The forest lies in the Flemish municipalities of Sint-Genesius-Rode, Hoeilaart, Overijse, and Tervuren, in the Brussels-Capital Region municipalities of Uccle, Watermael-Boitsfort, Auderghem, and Woluwe-Saint-Pierre, and in the Walloon towns of La Hulpe and Waterloo. Thus, it stretches out over the three Belgian Regions. It is maintained by Flanders (56%), the Brussels-Capital Region (38%), and Wallonia (6%). There are some contiguous tracts of privately held forest and the Kapucijnenbos, the "Capuchin Wood", which belongs to the Royal Trust. As of 2017, parts of the Sonian Forest have been inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the only Belgian component to the multinational inscription 'Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and Other Regions of Europe', because of their undisturbed nature and testimony to the ecological processes governing forests in Europe since the Last Glacial Period. History The forest is part of the scattered remains of the ancient Silva Carbonaria or Charcoal Forest. The first mention of the Sonian Forest (Soniaca Silva) dates from the early Middle Ages. Then the forest south of Brussels was crossed by the river Zenne/Senne and extended as far as Hainaut, covering most of the high ground between the Zenne and the Dijle. The ninth-century vita of Saint Foillan mentions "the forest, next to the abbey of Saint Gertrude, called the Sonesian". In the sixteenth century it was still seven leagues in circumference. At the start of the 19th century the area of the wood was still about 100 square kilometres, but due to wood cutting its area diminished to its current area of 44.21 km². The Forest extended in the Middle Ages over the southern part of Brabant up to the walls of Brussels and is mentioned, under the name of Ardennes, in Byron's Childe Harold. Originally it was part of the Forest of Ardennes, the Romans' Arduenna Silva, and even at the time of the French Revolution it was very extensive. A major blow towards its nineteenth-century contraction was struck when Napoleon Bonaparte ordered 22,000 oaks to be cut down in it to build the Boulogne flotilla intended for the invasion of