It took place in Brussels, Belgium, following the country's victory at the 1986 contest with the song "J'aime la vie" by Sandra Kim.

These are a set of exhibition halls built from 1930 on the Heysel/Heizel Plateau (Heysel Park) in Laeken (northern part of the City of Brussels) to celebrate the centenary of Belgian Independence.

The Centenary Palace (French: Palais du Centenaire, Dutch: Eeuwfeestpaleis), where the main stage was located, is one of the remaining buildings of the Brussels International Exposition of 1935.

The committee also decided that a potential place for the contest was the Royal Theatre of Antwerp, as both locations proposed by RTBF (the Palais du Centenaire in Brussels and the Patinoire de Coronmeuse [fr] in Liege), but they would have required heavy renovation works to meet the proposed technical specifications for the contest.

However, RTBF moved forward alone with its plans and confirmed that the Palais du Centenaire was the official contest's host venue.

Both regions had had independent broadcasters since 1960 (BRT in Flanders and RTBF in Wallonia) but had still agreed to jointly host the contest in the event of a Belgian victory.

[7] Holding the contest in Belgium caused several legal changes in the country's system and forced the implementation of most of the modern rules and regulations on the monetization of public television.

As a consequence, the RTBF was also allowed to sell sponsorship quotas for the event, setting a new precedent for the Eurovision Song Contest.

[8] Apart from the latent tensions, after the end of the contest the then-president of the BRT Cas Goossens praised RTBF for their "perfect organization" while at the same time regretting that the two broadcasters weren't able to collaborate.

Broadcasters were able to send commentators to provide coverage of the contest in their own native language and to relay information about the artists and songs to their television viewers.