Building · Eich & Rollingergrund
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.
Long before the Minett in the south, iron was made here. In 1609 a Lorraine ironmaster named Jean de Ryaville was licensed to build a furnace up the little valley of the Dommeldange brook, and it was the first blast furnace in Luxembourg: bog ore dug from the surrounding ground, charcoal from the Grünewald forest, six mills along the stream to work the bellows and hammers. The castle grew out of that. It seems to have been built in the seventeenth century by Thomas Marchant, the forge-master who took the works over in 1654, as his house, and in 1777 it passed with the works to Charles-Joseph Collart, whose family lived here through the nineteenth century, which is why old postcards call it the Château Collart. The old furnace up the valley went out after 1815; the hammer mill limped on until 1857.
The second act was the Metz brothers. In 1845 Auguste Metz built a modern works over the hill at Eich, on the Mühlenbach — the first steam engine in the country ran there, and from 1847 it smelted the red ore of the south, the minette, instead of bog iron; by 1858 three furnaces were burning. But the railway did not come up the Mühlenbach, it came up the Alzette, so from 1865 Norbert Metz built a new works down here, beside the tracks under the castle, and the Eich furnaces went out one by one. Dommeldange had four blast furnaces at its height; from 1909 it supplied the city of Luxembourg with electricity, and in 1911 it became part of the new ARBED — whose name, the Aciéries Réunies de Burbach-Eich-Dudelange, kept the E for Eich, where it had all begun. The last furnaces in the centre of the country were put out here in 1927; the foundry and the workshops carried on for most of the century, and the Institut Émile Metz, founded in 1915 to train the works' apprentices, is still a technical school.
The state bought the castle in 1973, and since then it has been the embassy of the People's Republic of China. You can't go in; but the valley, the stream and the old works site below the railway are all still there to read.
