Rham Plateau

The Alzette wraps around three sides of this high ground, which is why its oldest name, Dinsel, probably comes from the Latin word for island. Roman coins turn up here — from the reign of Gallienus in the 250s to Valentinian II in the 380s — and the historians think a Roman camp watched the river crossing from up here long before there was a Luxembourg.

The walls are the reason to come. Around 1380, under Wenceslas, King of Bohemia and Duke of Luxembourg, the city built its third ring of defences and took the Grund and this plateau inside it: a wall nine metres high and nearly two thick, six round towers twelve metres tall, a ditch twelve metres wide in front, and the Trier gate at the corner. Vauban, who took the city in 1684, thought the medieval wall useless against modern guns but kept it because it hid the town from view; behind it he built four barracks for his soldiers and one for their officers, and pushed the defences out with a ravelin and a redoubt. The Prussians added the last barracks in 1863, a massive bomb-proof block whose roof could be stripped off in wartime and replaced with a metre of earth. The Rham was the artillery's home — the folk song "Et wor emol e Kanonéier", about a gunner, was born of the garrison's dealings with the townspeople — and the octagonal water tower from 1842 still stands, with the well-keeper's house on the rocks, which everyone calls Noah's Ark.

When the fortress was dismantled after 1867, the demolition crews reached the Rham in 1874 with a plan by the landscape architect Édouard André, who had designed the city park: pull down the wall between the towers and reshape the towers themselves into picturesque ruins, the way the Hollow Tooth on the Bock had been. Two had already been "ruined" when the country's archaeological society wrote to the government, in April 1882, calling the work "an act of vandalism justified by nothing". The order came to stop at once — and everything was left exactly as it stood that day, which is what you see: two towers dressed as ruins, the others as the demolition found them, and the wall between them gone.

The barracks became a home for deaf children in 1880, and then the city's hospice for orphans and the old, which it still is.