Spanish Turrets

The little stone sentry box hanging off the rampart here is one of the Spanish Turrets — the Spuenesch Tiermercher — and once you've noticed one you'll start seeing them all along the old walls: a round body, a pointed roof, a slit to look out of. They were built so a sentry could keep watch over the outer works of the fortress out of the wind and the rain, and spot a spy sneaking in or a deserter sneaking out. The French call the type an échauguette, or a poivrière, a pepper pot.

Why "Spanish", nobody can say for certain. The name first turns up in a letter of 1875, when the fortress was being dismantled and the historical society asked the government to spare a few pieces of it, two Spanish turrets among them. The obvious explanation is that they date from the Spanish years — but this one, on the Boulevard Victor Thorn, was built in 1671, the ones on the Kirchberg side went up under Vauban after the French took the city in 1684, and that same letter calls the towers at the Pfaffenthal gates "Spanish" even though those were Vauban's for certain. The word may simply have meant "old".

Old plans and prints suggest there were once as many as forty of them. Nine survive, from Fort Niedergrünewald above the Pfaffenthal to the Fort Verluerekascht above the Grund, all under modern roofs and a couple almost entirely rebuilt. In 1994 the tourist office put one on its logo.

The one on the Kirchberg heights carries the hardest story. In the night before the 5th of October 1941, days ahead of the census in which the Nazi occupiers expected Luxembourgers to declare themselves German — and in which they answered "Luxembourgish" three times over — someone painted that turret red, white and blue. Hubert Baumgarten, from the Pfaffenthal below it, was accused of doing it and arrested. He died in Dachau in 1943.