From July 13th to 16th 2021, a long period of sustained and heavy rainfall affected Central Europe producing extreme rainfall amounts in western Germany, eastern Belgium, Luxembourg and The Netherlands. In Belgium, this unusual event induced massive flooding on a large part of the country and was responsible for 39 fatalities and strong damages to buildings and infrastructures. Such extremely rare event needs to be documented as much as possible and data must be made available for further studies in hydrology, in urban planning and, more generally, in all multi-disciplinary studies aiming at identifying and understanding all factors leading to such disaster. The observational rainfall data available for Belgium during the period from July 13th to July 16th 2021 are here shared with the scientific community. These data are twofold and provided in 2 parts: Part 1. Observations from high-quality rain gauges The dataset includes daily precipitation accumulation recorded by 323 weighing and manual rain gauges in ...