About
Why Nearby History?
You are standing in front of it. You know it matters — the guidebook said so, the people taking photographs say so — and you feel nothing in particular. A gilded figure on a column. A bridge. A wall with a view.
What is missing is the story. Who put it there, what it cost, what happened to it since. The Gëlle Fra was pulled down by an occupying army, vanished for forty years, and turned up under the stand of a football stadium. Once you know that, you are not looking at a statue any more.
Nearby History is that story, for 74 places in Luxembourg City, told to you where you stand.
Written, not generated.
Every story here was written by hand and checked against published sources before it was recorded. There are 74 of them, not three million, and that is the point: each one has been read, corrected, and read again. When one is wrong, it gets fixed, and the recording is made again.
It starts where you are.
No tour to book and no starting point to find. Open the guide on any street in the city and the nearest story is already waiting; walk on, and the next one finds you. If you would rather be taken somewhere, ask, and it walks you there.
Read to you.
Put the phone in your pocket. The guide speaks when you arrive, gives directions when you ask for them, and otherwise stays quiet.
Free, and yours.
No subscription, and no account needed to start. Sign in only if you want what you have heard to follow you to another device — and even then, with a passkey or your Google account, never a password to make up.
One city, on purpose.
Luxembourg is small enough to know properly. Rather than a thin layer over forty cities, this is a thick one over one — the quarters, the bridges, the valleys, and the odd place a bus ride away.
It is made in Luxembourg, and it is a work in progress: places get added, stories get corrected. If you find a mistake, say so.