Holy Ghost Citadel

The rocky tongue of land at the southern tip of the old town, with the Pétrusse on one side and the Alzette on the other, is the Holy Ghost plateau, and it is named after nuns. Around 1234 a group of women settled here outside the medieval walls, caring for "fallen" girls and the poor; twenty years later they became Poor Clares, but the name of the Holy Ghost stuck. People also called it the Schuedbierg convent, after the fair that John the Blind founded on this plateau in 1340 — the fair that still comes to town every August as the Schueberfouer, though it long ago moved to the Glacis.

A convent on the best defensive ground in the city was never going to be left alone. In the fifteenth century one of its chapels was knocked down to make room for a ring wall, in 1673 soldiers were billeted inside, and in 1690 Vauban, who wanted the site for his new citadel, moved the last fifteen nuns down to the hospice in the Pfaffenthal. The convent became barracks for 560 men, its church a depot, its stables a hospital. The buildings were gone by about 1770, but the stables survived — until the courts came.

For a century after the fortress was dismantled, the old barracks up here housed one government office after another. Then, between 2003 and 2008, the plateau was rebuilt as the Cité judiciaire, the Judiciary City: eight buildings that bring every court in the country under one roof, except the European ones on the Kirchberg. The architects, the brothers Rob and Léon Krier, drew them in a deliberately classical manner so they would sit inside a UNESCO World Heritage site without shouting, kept the eighteenth-century Vauban barracks as the district court, and designed the youth court so that it would not look like a courthouse at all. The digging for it, in 2001 and 2002, uncovered the walls of the medieval convent under three metres of rubble; since 2025 they can be visited on guided tours, and a crypt is being arranged so that by 2028 anyone can walk down to them.

The highest point of the plateau, the Kanounenhiwwel — the cannon hill — carries the national monument to the Second World War, a few steps away.