Place d'Armes

Locals just call it the Plëss, and if you arrange to meet someone in Luxembourg without saying where, this is where they'll be. It's the city's living room: terraces under the plane trees, the bandstand, the flea market on Saturday mornings and the Christmas market in December.

It began with a disaster. In 1554 the gunpowder stored in the church of the Franciscan convent blew up, and the fire that followed destroyed much of the upper town. The rebuilding plans called for a "new forum" in the middle of it — a square of 96 by 64 metres, about the size of the Grand-Place in Brussels at the time. What was finally built was smaller. In 1671 the governor, the Count of Monterey, and his engineer Louvigny had 95 houses in the lower town pulled down to strengthen the walls, rehoused the families up here on the old convent gardens, and inaugurated the square and its new streets on the 10th of August. The garrison used it as its parade ground, which is what a place d'armes is, and Louis XIV's troops paved it and planted the first lime trees.

For two centuries it stayed a soldiers' square. A guardhouse ran along one side, sentries paced up and down, and on Sundays the infantry marched in behind its band. Under your feet a well dug in 1741 drops sixty-five metres through the sandstone; the road tunnel bored under the city in the early 1960s reaches it by a side gallery. When the fortress was dismantled the soldiers went, the guardhouse was demolished in 1902 to make room for the Cercle, and the cafés and the bandstand took over. The first kiosk went up in 1875, and the story goes that at the concerts the boys circled it one way and the girls the other, so as to pass each other more often. Then the cars moved in: the square was a car park until 1969, when it was closed to traffic and became the heart of the pedestrian zone.

At the west end, in the little Square Jan Palach — renamed in 1969 after the Czech student who burned himself to death in protest at the crushing of the Prague Spring — stands the monument to Dicks and Michel Lentz, the two national poets. A worker and a peasant girl by Pierre Federspiel flank a stele with the poets' medallions and the Luxembourg lion on top; carved into it is the refrain of Lentz's "Feierwon", the song that greeted the country's first railway. Lentz also wrote the words of the national anthem. And a plaque on the Cercle recalls the 10th of September 1944, when the people of Luxembourg welcomed their liberators on this square: the American 5th Armored Division, with Prince Félix and the young Prince Jean riding in with them.