Luxemburg

Introduction

Lotte and me spent a prolonged weekend in Luxemburg. We drove to the capital Luxembourg on Friday evening and made day trips from there.

July 21st (day 1): Echternach

Echternach is a small town near the border with Germany. It grew around the abbey which was founded in 698 AD and is famous for its proverbially slow yearly procession.
After checking out the town we made two walks that we read about in a brochure found at the tourist office. These walks turned out to be the best part of the trip. The first was to the Wolfsschlucht (Wolf Gorge) just west of the town.
The second walk was to the Teufelsschlucht (Devil's gorge) some 10km north of Echternach. We didn't realise until we drove back that this place wasn't in Luxemburg but across the border in Germany. This walk was just as good, lovely forest and rocks.
On the ride back to Luxembourg we made a stop in a little town called Junglinster.

July 22nd (day 2): Luxembourg

We'd already walked around the center after arriving on Friday evening but now we took a whole day to check out this city. It's a very pretty place with a lot of green.

The Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Luxembourg is a 17th-century cathedral with a beautiful interior.
The Casemates are a network of underground galleries hewn into the rocks below Luxembourg in the 17th and 18th centuries. They were 23km long in total, of which 17km remain. They are now one of the main sights in Luxembourg and are a Unesco World Heritage site. We visited the Casemates in the Rocher du Bock, the rock on which the first part of Luxembourg was built in 963 AD.
After visiting the Casemates we descended from the Rocher du Bock into the valley of the Alzette which cuts through Luxembourg like a canyon. This valley is full of trees and is crossed by several bridges, which is an amazing sight since on both sides of the valley there is the city, built on flat ground. It's like a big river flowing through a town and crossed by bridges, but instead of water you're looking down on trees.
In the late afternoon we drove to the European area, which was deserted since it was a sunday, and found the beautiful Salle de Concerts Joséphine-Charlotte, a new concert hall designed by Christian de Portzamparc. Superb architecture, I'm jealous that we have nothing like this in Belgium.
Finally some pics of us...
Luxembourg is a really nice city, and the valley makes it unique. What is also remarkable is that in this city (and in most of Luxemburg) every restaurant has menus in Dutch and waiters do their best to understand Dutch (I heard Dutch tourists try several times). It's harder to get serviced in Dutch in Brussels, sadly.

July 23rd (day 3): Castles

We left the hotel in the morning and visited two mediavel castles before heading back to Belgium.

Vianden Castle

The castle of Vianden is Luxemburg's most famous. There was already a castle here in late Roman times, but the current one was built from the 11th to 14th century and further expanded in the 18th. In the 19th century it fell into ruin, but it was restorated in the 1970s. Rebuilt would be a better term, the castle seems like a new, unauthentic building now. Judging from the old pictures we saw they should have just kept the ruins the way they were.

Bourscheid Castle

From Vianden we drove to Bourscheid, a long ride through forests and over climbing roads with lots of hairpin corners. Luxemburg seems like a big country this way! Bourscheid has a big castle that was built in the 14th and 15th centuries. The GPS was programmed to bring us straight to the castle but wanted to send us over a terrible tractor path, so instead we found our own way...
From Bourscheid we drove home to Belgium through the pouring rain. This was a very nice trip, Luxemburg is perfect for a long weekend!