natur musée

The long building on the river between the abbey and the church started life as a hospice. A house for the old, the sick and the orphaned is recorded here in the fourteenth century, the ancestor of the city's civil hospices, and the Hospice Saint-Jean it became kept that work up for hundreds of years. Since 1996 it has held the natur musée, the national museum of natural history, and the sculptures and inscriptions over the old doorway are the hospice's.

The museum itself is a story of a collection that could never find a home. It began in 1850, when a society for the natural sciences was founded under the patronage of Prince Henry, the new governor, and given a few rooms in the Athenaeum, the old Jesuit college up in town; the cabinets opened to the public in 1854. In 1892 it was pushed out to the Vauban barracks in the Pfaffenthal, which nobody wanted to visit; in 1922 into the old gendarmerie on the Fish Market, which it had to share with the museum of history and art — and where the renovations dragged on so long that the collections were shut away for thirty-four years, to the fury of the public. After the war it opened room by room, bought the country's first electron microscope, took on geophysics and astrophysics, and ran out of space again. In January 1990 the Chamber of Deputies voted to restore the hospice in the Grund for it; it opened here in June 1996, in three buildings — one for the displays, one for the classrooms, one for the laboratories where the collections are still studied.

The person to meet inside is the Loschbour man, found in a rock shelter in the Müllerthal in 1935: a hunter who lived around eight thousand years ago, in the Middle Stone Age, and whose bones are the oldest human remains ever found in Luxembourg. Everyone in this city, in the end, is one of his neighbours.