The guide
Seventy-four places, ten quarters.
Written the way a friend who lives here would tell them, and checked against the record. Read them here — or stand in front of them, and let the guide read them to you.
Old Town
The plateau inside the old walls: the palace, the cathedral, the casemates, and the Gëlle Fra looking out over the valley.
Bridge · 2 min
Adolphe Bridge
A single stone arch thrown across the Pétrusse valley in 1903, linking the old fortified city to the new station district. It became the country's unofficial national symbol.
Monument · 2 min
Bock Casemates
The rock where Luxembourg began in 963, and the tunnels carved beneath it — a fortress now remembered mostly by its underside. Part of the UNESCO listing.
Building · 2 min
Casino Luxembourg
The 1882 Casino Bourgeois, a private club where Franz Liszt gave the last recital of his life. A forum for contemporary art since 1996.
Bridge · 2 min
Castle Bridge
The two-storey bridge of 1735 that ties the old town to the Bock — with four ways across it — and the "ruin" on the rock that isn't one.
Building · 2 min
Cercle Cité
The city's grand civic hall on Place d'Armes, won in a 1904 competition by a father-and-son team. Europe's first court sat here before it had a home.
Viewpoint · 2 min
Chemin de la Corniche
A walk along the top of the 17th-century ramparts, from the Bock to the Holy Ghost citadel, looking down over the Grund. "The most beautiful balcony in Europe."
Park · 2 min
City Park
Nineteen hectares laid out by Édouard André in the 1870s on the ground cleared when the fortress walls came down. Home to Luxembourg's first public monument.
Point of interest · 2 min
Fish Market
The oldest square in the city, where the two Roman roads crossed and the fish market stood for centuries.
Memorial · 2 min
Gëlle Fra
The Golden Lady, Luxembourg's memorial to its war dead — torn down by the occupiers in 1940, and not standing here again in full until 1985.
Building · 2 min
Grand Ducal Palace
Where the Grand Duke works and receives — his office and state rooms, in daily use. The family's home is Berg Castle, 20 km north of the city.
Statue · 2 min
Grand Duchess Charlotte Monument
Charlotte, standing with open hands, by Jean Cardot, 1990. She kept the monarchy in 1919, refused the occupiers in 1940, and came home in 1945 to crowds shouting "we love you".
Fountain · 2 min
Hämmelsmarsch Fountain
Five bronze sheep, four musicians and two children, marking the procession that announces the Schueberfouer. The accordion player is the sculptor himself.
Monument · 3 min
Holy Ghost Citadel
A convent of 1234 where the Schueberfouer was born, a citadel Vauban built on top of it, barracks, and since 2008 the courts — the plateau at the tip of the old town has been every kind of power in turn.
Building · 2 min
Hôtel Saint-Maximin
The town house of the Trier abbey that once owned the Bock, built in 1751 — the fortress governor's residence, then the seat of the government since 1867, today the Prime Minister's office.
Statue · 2 min
Le Passe-muraille
Two pierced bronze hemispheres you can step inside, six metres across, with 8,000 holes letting the park through. The artist left it unsigned.
Building · 2 min
Luxembourg City Museum
A thousand years of city history inside four restored townhouses, with a glass lift that descends past the bare rock the city was built on.
Memorial · 2 min
National Solidarity Monument
The country's memorial to the Second World War, with its eternal flame, unveiled on the 10th of October 1971 — thirty years to the day after the census in which Luxembourgers told the occupier "no" three times.
Place of worship · 2 min
Notre-Dame Cathedral
Luxembourg's only cathedral, built for the Jesuits in the early 1600s and raised to cathedral rank long afterwards.
Bridge · 2 min
Passerelle
The Old Bridge — a viaduct of 1861 that carried the city out to its new railway station, forty years before the Adolphe Bridge existed.
Monument · 2 min
Pétrusse Casemates
Tunnels cut into the rock beneath Place de la Constitution, begun by the Spanish in 1644 and driven deeper by Vauban's engineers.
Viewpoint · 2 min
Pfaffenthal Panoramic Elevator
A free glass lift that drops 71 metres through the cliff between the Ville Haute and the Pfaffenthal, opened in 2016 after a four-year delay.
Point of interest · 3 min
Place d'Armes
The city's living room — a parade ground laid out in 1671 on the ashes of a gunpowder fire, where the garrison drilled, the bandstand played, and everyone still meets.
Statue · 2 min
Place Guillaume II
The Knuedler — the city's main square, with the town hall along one side and a market twice a week.
Place of worship · 2 min
Quirinus Chapel
Half built, half cut into the Pétrusse cliff, beside a spring people believed could heal. Thought to be the city's oldest place of worship; the Gothic front dates from 1355.
Place of worship · 2 min
Saint Michael’s Church
The oldest place of worship in the city. A castle chapel stood here in 987; what you see is the 1688 rebuild, Romanesque below and Baroque above.
Memorial · 2 min
Shoah Memorial
Grey-pink granite by Shelomo Selinger, who survived nine camps. Unveiled on 17 June 2018, seventy-five years to the day after the last deportation train left Luxembourg.
Monument · 2 min
Spanish Turrets
Nine little sentry boxes still perch on the old walls, and no one can say why they're "Spanish" — one of them got a coat of red, white and blue in 1941, and a man died for it.
Building · 2 min
Théâtre des Capucins
A Capuchin convent of 1623 that became the garrison's granary, then the city's theatre for a century — and is a theatre again.
Monument · 2 min
Three Towers
The city's oldest standing building — a gate of about 1050 with two round towers added two centuries later, a prison in its old age, and the badge on a Luxembourg prison warder's collar today.
Place of worship · 2 min
Trinity Church
Built for Augustinian canonesses in 1737, taken by the state in 1817 for Prussian garrison troops, and Protestant ever since. A crypt of 125 nuns lies under the floor.
Building · 3 min
Villa Louvigny
A fortress redoubt turned pleasure garden turned radio station — for sixty years the home of Radio Luxembourg, and twice of the Eurovision Song Contest.
Building · 2 min
Villa Vauban
The city's art museum, in an 1873 villa on the site of one of Vauban's forts. Europe's first court sat here in the 1950s; Grand Duke Jean lived here in the 1990s.
The Grund
The valley floor under the cliffs, along the Alzette — the oldest and lowest part of town.
Statue · 2 min
Melusina
The mermaid wife of the count who founded Luxembourg, sitting on the bank where the legend says she vanished. 3D printed in 2015.
Building · 2 min
natur musée
The medieval hospice of the Grund, now the national natural history museum — home of the Loschbour man, who lived by the Ernz eight thousand years ago and is the oldest Luxembourger anyone has met.
Building · 2 min
Neumünster Abbey
A Benedictine abbey begun in 1606, the state prison from 1869 to 1985, and since 2004 a cultural centre beside the river.
Monument · 3 min
Rham Plateau
The island in the river where the Romans camped and King Wenceslas walled the city in 1390 — its round towers were being turned into fake ruins when someone finally cried "vandalism".
Place of worship · 2 min
Saint John's Church
The church on the river beside the abbey, in its present shape since 1705, keeps a fourteenth-century Black Madonna that once drew pilgrims to the Grund.
Quarter · 2 min
The Grund
The old lower town along the Alzette, beneath the cliffs — once mills and tanneries, now the best of the city's evenings.
Monument · 2 min
Tour Jacob
The medieval gate on the road from Trier, and the fortified bridge below it — the oldest defences still standing in the city, from the wall King Wenceslas built around 1390.
Pfaffenthal
Downstream of the Grund, under the Red Bridge: Vauban's gates across the river, the leper hospice that named them, and the quarter the city forgot and then remembered.
Quarter · 2 min
Pfaffenthal
The valley quarter under the Red Bridge, once home to one Luxembourger in six — a working town the city forgot, an explosion in 1976 that killed three, and ten years of waiting for the houses that replaced the rubble.
Point of interest · 2 min
Pfaffenthal-Kirchberg Station
A railway station in the valley and a funicular up the cliff, opened in 2017 so that the plateau of Europe's courts and banks could be reached by train — free to ride, and a lift for anyone on foot or on a bike.
Monument · 3 min
Vauban Towers
Two gate towers and a wall across the river, built by Vauban in 1685 to shut the valley — one of them named after the leper house that stood outside it for five hundred years.
Clausen
Round the bend of the river: a governor's lost Renaissance palace, four centuries of brewing, and the house where the man who thought up the European Union was born.
Memorial · 2 min
Clausen War Cemetery
The old Prussian garrison cemetery on the hill out of Clausen — soldiers of 1813, of the fifty-year garrison, of 1870, and 467 German dead of the two world wars, left where they lay when the others were moved to Sandweiler.
Monument · 2 min
Mansfeld Palace
The Renaissance palace a Spanish governor spent forty years building in Clausen, with gardens full of Roman statues — bequeathed to the King of Spain, stripped, and gone within a century. Two gates and a fountain are what's left.
Building · 2 min
Rives de Clausen
Seven centuries of beer on one bend of the river — the monks of Münster brewed here by 1300, Mansfeld built a brewery of his own, and the Mousel family made the name; the old brewery is now the city's nightlife.
Building · 2 min
Robert Schuman's Birthplace
The house in Clausen where, in 1886, the man who would propose the European Union was born — a German citizen with a Lorraine father and a Luxembourg mother, three hundred metres from the offices that carry his name.
Kirchberg
Across the Red Bridge: a fortress, a concert hall, and the quarter Europe was built in.
Building · 2 min
Court of Justice
Europe's supreme court, in Luxembourg since 1952 — a steel temple of 1973 now wrapped in a golden ring, with the tallest tower in the country and a view over four nations from the top.
Building · 2 min
De Gasperi Building
The "High House" — Luxembourg's first skyscraper, opened in 1966 for the European Parliament's staff on a plateau that was still fields, and the reason the Kirchberg became the European quarter.
Monument · 2 min
Fort Niedergrünewald
The fort Vauban built in 1685 on the spot where his own guns had shelled the city — its redoubt and ditch dug out of the park below the Mudam, with a counter-mine gallery you can walk into.
Monument · 2 min
Fort Thüngen
An Austrian fort of 1732, nicknamed the Three Acorns for the gilded acorns on its towers. Rebuilt on its own foundations, it has held the fortress museum since 2012.
Building · 2 min
Mudam
I. M. Pei's museum of contemporary art, opened in 2006 on the walls of Fort Thüngen after seventeen years of argument about whether a fortress should have to share.
Building · 2 min
National Library
The country's memory, in a building of 2019 at the far end of the Kirchberg — 1.8 million items, a copy of everything printed in Luxembourg, and since 2024 the Giant Bible of Saint Maximin, from the abbey that sold Siegfried his rock.
Building · 2 min
Philharmonie
The national concert hall, opened in 2005, ringed by 823 white steel columns standing like a forest. Christian de Portzamparc's filter between the city and the music.
Bridge · 2 min
Red Bridge
The red steel span that made Kirchberg possible, designed by Egon Jux, load-tested with twelve Patton tanks and opened in 1966.
Limpertsberg
Up the hill north of the centre: the Glacis and its fair since 1340, the chapel of the country's patron, the cemetery, the theatre, and the memorials to the years of occupation.
Point of interest · 2 min
Glacis
The fortress's killing ground, kept empty by the guns — and since 1890 the home of the Schueberfouer, the fair John the Blind founded in 1340, which fills it for three weeks every summer.
Place of worship · 3 min
Glacis Chapel
Where a Jesuit set down a statue of the Virgin in the plague year 1624 — the beginning of the Octave, the national pilgrimage, and of the Comforter of the Afflicted as patron of the country. The chapel is from 1885; the tram found the old one in 2016.
Building · 2 min
Grand Théâtre
The city's theatre since 1964, by the Paris architect Alain Bourbonnais. It hosted Eurovision twice, in 1973 and 1984.
Memorial · 2 min
Notre-Dame Cemetery
The city's great cemetery on the Glacis, begun in 1779 for a parish whose church had just been demolished — on ground where the fortress had buried its deserters since 1691. Under the plane trees, the mausoleum of the French dead of 1914 and the Hinzert Cross.
Memorial · 2 min
Resistance and Deportation Memorial
A cross built in 1946 from beams taken out of the SS camp at Hinzert, standing over the graves of 82 executed Luxembourgers.
Memorial · 2 min
Robert Schuman Monument
A memorial to the Luxembourg-born statesman whose 1950 declaration set the European project in motion.
Place of worship · 2 min
Saint Joseph's Church
The last church in Luxembourg built in the Romanesque revival, finished in 1913 for a quarter that had just been fields — Rhineland arches on the outside, and inside a six-metre tree of life for a tabernacle.
Gare & Hollerich
South of the Pétrusse, the city the railway built: the station, the bank and the steel company that paid for the country, a rose garden, a villa the Gestapo used, and the platform the deportations left from.
Building · 2 min
ARBED Building
The palace the steel company built for itself in 1922, when ARBED was the country — a French château of sandstone with Victory crowning Mercury over the door; sold to a bank in 2014, as the economy was.
Memorial · 2 min
Deportation Memorial
The little station at Hollerich from which the occupier sent away a generation — the forced conscripts and the resettled families — and, since 1975, the country's memorial to them, in slate, sandstone and three crosses beside three stars of David.
Building · 3 min
Luxembourg Station
A wooden station of 1859, built to be burned if the fortress were besieged, and the Moselle-baroque palace of 1913 that replaced it — the building that pulled a second city out of the fields south of the Pétrusse.
Park · 2 min
Place des Martyrs
The rose garden laid out in the 1920s at the heart of the new quarter, on streets named for a strike and a plebiscite — with a Henry Moore mother and child where the paths meet, facing the steel company's door.
Building · 2 min
Spuerkeess Building
The state savings bank's castle of 1913 at the end of the Adolphe Bridge — 46 metres of clock tower, Mercury and Fortuna at the door, and, in the old casemates underneath, a gallery with the country's Edward Steichen collection.
Memorial · 2 min
Villa Pauly
A surgeon's turreted villa of 1923 that the Gestapo made its headquarters in 1940 — two to three thousand Luxembourgers were interrogated in its cellars. Since 2001 it has been the home of the country's resistance archive.
Bonnevoie
Beyond the tracks: two roundhouses of 1877, and a village of nuns and glove-makers that became the city's biggest quarter.
Quarter · 2 min
Bonnevoie
An abbey of Cistercian nuns from 1200, a glove factory with fifteen hundred workers whose goatskin gloves went to America, and the railway that turned a village into the city's most populous quarter.
Building · 2 min
Rotondes
Two railway roundhouses of 1877, each built to stable eighteen steam locomotives — idle for a century, a bus garage, and since 2015 the city's most unusual arts centre.
Eich & Rollingergrund
Down the Alzette and up the Mühlenbach valley: the porcelain factory that became Villeroy & Boch, the ironmasters' castles, and the house the Russians bought.
Building · 2 min
Beggen Castle
An ironmaster's château of 1895 in the manner of Vaux-le-Vicomte — occupied by the Wehrmacht, then the US Army, briefly a hotel, and since 1956 the Soviet and then the Russian embassy, stormed by a crowd in the year of the Hungarian uprising.
Building · 2 min
Dommeldange Castle
The ironmasters' house at the top of the valley — where Luxembourg's first blast furnace was lit in 1609, and where the Metz family's works lit the city's streets a century ago. Today it is the Chinese embassy.
Building · 2 min
Septfontaines Castle
The house the Boch brothers built in 1783 beside the porcelain factory they had opened at the seven springs in 1767 — the beginning of Villeroy & Boch, on the site of the city's washhouse.
Cents & Hamm
East of the city, on the plateau above the river: a fort that stored champagne, and the cemetery that needs the trip.
Memorial · 2 min
American Cemetery
More than five thousand American graves from the Battle of the Bulge, among them General Patton's.
Monument · 2 min
Fort Dumoulin
The first fort of the fortress built in the modern polygonal way, in 1836 — thrown up as an earthwork in the siege of 1794, named after a Prussian commandant, and, after the walls came down, a champagne cellar for Mercier.