Place Guillaume II

Everyone in Luxembourg just calls this square "Knuedler," and it's the closest thing the city has to a main square — city hall on one side, a produce and farmers' market that still sets up here on Wednesday and Saturday mornings, the way it has for centuries.

The rider on the horse in the middle is William II, King of the Netherlands and, at the same time, Grand Duke of Luxembourg — back when the two titles were held by the same person. He's remembered here mostly for granting Luxembourg its first constitution in 1848, a real turning point that gave the country a measure of self-government it hadn't had before. The statue went up in 1884, cast in bronze by the French sculptors Antonin Mercié and Victor Peter, showing him in military dress on horseback — and if it looks familiar to a Dutch visitor, that's because an exact copy stands in The Hague.

The name "Knuedler" itself comes from an old Franciscan monastery that used to stand on this exact spot — "Knued" refers to the knotted cord Franciscan monks wore as a belt. The French seized the monastery in 1797, Napoleon handed the ground to the city as a gift on a visit in 1804, and the last of the monastery was pulled down in 1829 — its stones went into the town hall. When the square was dug up for a car park in 2018, the foundations of the thirteenth-century church came back to light, along with a crypt nobody knew was there.

City hall, the Hôtel de Ville behind the statue, is a neoclassical building from the 1830s — plain columns, symmetrical facade, a very different architectural mood from the older Gothic and Renaissance buildings elsewhere in the old town, and a sign of the more modern civic identity Luxembourg was building for itself at the time.