City Park

This is the City Park — most locals just call it the Stater Park — nineteen hectares wrapped around the west and north of the old town, the largest of the city's fifteen parks and the closest thing central Luxembourg has to a green lung. It was laid out between 1872 and 1878 by Édouard André, the French landscape architect who had just made the Buttes-Chaumont in Paris, on ground that opened up once the fortifications along this side of the city were dismantled under the 1867 neutrality treaty. He kept the lumpy, ditched terrain the demolition left and designed around it.

That history is part of what makes it interesting to walk through: the winding paths, ponds, and mature trees sit directly on top of what used to be military ground — one of the clearest examples in the city of former fortress land turning into public space once Luxembourg no longer needed to defend itself street by street.

Keep an eye out as you wander. The statue of Princess Amalia, unveiled in 1876, was the first public monument ever put up in Luxembourg; a giant sequoia thirty-seven metres tall stands beside it. There are busts of Victor Hugo and Mahatma Gandhi, and a horse chestnut planted in 1921 to mark the birth of the future Grand Duke Jean, still growing. The Villa Louvigny in the middle of the park was the home of Radio Luxembourg for sixty years, and hosted the Eurovision Song Contest in 1962 and 1966. There's no single front entrance or focal point; the park rewards wandering rather than beelining to one spot, which is very much the point of an English-style landscape park.