Vauban Towers

When Vauban besieged Luxembourg in 1684 he noticed that the Pfaffenthal, the valley below the old town, was barely defended — and once he had taken the city he set about fixing what he had exploited. In 1685 he pulled the valley inside the fortress: two forts on the heights above, and down here, across the river, a wall with a covered walkway on top, closed at each end by a gate tower. The wall is the Béinchen — the "little leg" — and the two towers are the Porte d'Eich on the left bank and the Porte des Bons-Malades on the right. Between them the Alzette itself could be shut like a door. Look up at the gate towers and you can see the openings from which the defenders could drop stones on anyone who reached the foot of the wall.

The gates kept soldiers in as much as enemies out: a garrison this size lost men to desertion every week, and the sentries here were watching for uniforms going the wrong way. In 1743 the Austrians added a ravelin in front of the Eich gate. The ditches were filled in when the fortress was dismantled and dug out again in 1997, and the whole ensemble has been on UNESCO's World Heritage list since 1994. There is a small room upstairs in the Bons-Malades gate where a film tells the story of the fortress.

The name is older than the tower. "Bons-Malades" — the good sick — is what the city called its lepers, and the valley beyond this gate, the Siechenhof, was where it kept them. There was a gate here by 1338, and a leper house outside it from the early thirteenth century until about 1770, with its own chapel and its own cemetery; a document of Countess Ermesinde mentions the disease in 1238. Diagnosis meant a journey to Trier or Liège, escorted, to be examined by an approved expert; a verdict meant the rest of your life on this side of the wall. From 1514 a brotherhood looked after the lepers, and kind souls sold little egg cakes on the third Sunday after Easter to raise money for them. The Pfaffenthal still celebrates that day, the Fliederchersdag, every year: the cakes are blessed in the old leper chapel, which is now the cemetery's mortuary, and handed out.