A Few Days near Luxembourg City

20/04/2025

After leaving Besançon we had another city in our sights for our journey home. Luxembourg City was to be another foray into Luxembourg for something other than cheap fuel. Although yet again we tried to time our entry into Luxembourg with an empty fuel tank.

Camping Bon-Accueil

A bit of investigation had revealed some park ups in the city itself, but nothing ‘official’.  As we wanted to explore the city for a couple of days, and it was Easter, we decided to book a campsite. We booked a few days in advance and Bon-Accueil was the only one of the two campsites near the city with any availability. When we arrived we were expecting it to be busy and we were right. A steady stream of arrivals of all nationalities filled up the available spaces (a few pitches were unavailable while they were re-seeding the grass, the local sparrows were making the most of it). By early evening the Full sign was up.

The campsite is in the town of Hesperange and is next to the park. The on site cafe was popular with locals as well as campsite guests.

War memorial in Hesperange, dedicated to three members of the 11th Tank Battalion who died when their tank overturned in the river.

We enjoyed our stay here. The water temperature in the showers was a bit hit-and-miss (I made a hasty retreat one morning when all I got was freezing cold water) but otherwise the facilities were good and the surroundings were peaceful. It was good value for money (we assume it was a municipal campsite) and worked out at £22 a night.

Camping Bon Accueil

As well as motorhomes and caravans it was nice to see some proper campers staying under canvas. It was obviously a popular destination for touring cyclists as a number turned up for the pitches in the centre of the campsite, unloading their panniers and setting up their tiny tents before moving on the next morning. We looked on with interest, we’d like to do a cycle tour at some point and wanted to see how people managed to fit everything they needed into saddlebags. The answer seemed to be having pairs of bags on both front and back of the bike and other receptacles on the handlebars and frame. A bit of Mary Poppins magic would probably help too although I didn’t see a hatstand on any pitch.

Our people watching wasn’t just confined to the cyclists. Our next door neighbours, an older German couple, spent the majority of their time outside their motorhome under the awning. The reason being that they were pipe smokers. It made us giggle seeing them puffing away on their pipes, not something you see often these days.

A Free Ride

We spent three days exploring Luxembourg city and the area around the campsite. We had a 30 minute journey into the city centre but getting there was made very easy by the provision of free public transport. We used the bus from outside the campsite and then changed to get the tram into the city. The mobiliteit.lu app was very useful for planning journeys by public transport and the fact it was free made it really easy to hop on and off without any stress about navigating a ticketing system.

We found it interesting that Luxembourg has both free public transport and also some of the cheapest fuel in Europe. As a result are the numbers of cars reducing? Or being used less? It doesn’t appear to be having the impact that you might have expected. Car use is still predominant and car ownership high. There are certainly a lot of supercars and premium cars around, a signifier of the affluence of the country.

Electric City Bikes

As well as making use of the public transport options we also used the electric bike service vel’OH!. This wasn’t quite as successful as we would have liked. Using the app to free up the bikes was very temperamental. We were sure we must be doing something wrong as we selected a bike and were instructed to take it from it’s stand only to find it was still firmly locked in place. Once we finally managed to free a couple of bikes we started our bike ride along the very pleasant riverside cycle route but Paul’s bike lost charge. Luckily the route was pretty flat until we found another station where we could exchange bikes. His next bike ran out of charge almost immediately. We realised that the reviews on the app were really important for selecting a reliable and recently serviced bike.

These frustrations didn’t stop us enjoying the journey but did make it more of a mission than we’d envisaged. To top it off I realised I hadn’t locked my bike back in it’s stand properly and it was still clocking up time, I had to run back down to the bike station to lock it back in place. Fortunately for us it was still in it’s docking station (and still within the very reasonable 2 euro intro period).

Riding one of the Vel’Oh! bikes

There was plenty to see on the cycle ride into the city. It was a popular route and we saw quite a few mountain bikers peeling off into the surrounding woodland where the terrain was more interesting.

Up and Down

Once in the city there are plenty of different areas to explore and, as Luxembourg is a city of rivers and cliffs, there are some interesting transport options to help avoid the climbs and descents. Some of these are tourist attractions in their own right. There is a funicular which takes you up to the Kirchberg district, and a couple of lifts with viewpoints where selfies were the order of the day. Across the two rivers are many bridges, old and new, including the Adolphe Bridge with it’s pedestrian walkway underneath the road.

The Pfaffenthal panoramic lift

Forts and Defences of Luxembourg

The Alzette and Pétrusse rivers have carved their routes through the surrounding rock leaving a number of crags separated by deep valleys. Historically this has provided ideal positions for defence.

The Bock is one of these promontories and is where the city of Luxembourg could be said to have started. Back in 963 a castle was built on the top of the cliff, surrounded by a loop of river.  A  settlement built up around the castle.

One of the few remaining parts of the medieval fortifications.

A fairly complex history ensued with a succession of different rulers invading or being handed the city. The original medieval cellars of the castle were expanded by the Spaniards. Vauban had a go at expanding the defences of the area when the French took control, taking advantage of the underground tunnels and connecting different cliffs with tunnels and bridges. Then the Austrians further expanded the tunnels and added cannon loops, they had officially become ‘casemates’ (gun emplacements).

When the fortifications were demolished (as part of agreeing to the establishment of Luxembourg as an independent state) the tunnels were left. Their military usefulness may have diminished but they were used as shelters and stores in the two World Wars and eventually became tourist attractions that we visited. We explored the tunnels, winding our way up and down staircases and peering into dimly lit corners. Side tunnels led into gun emplacements where we could get amazing views out over the city and down into the river below.

Pont du Chateau – built between two of the cliffs of the Bock. There are four routes across and under this bridge. Redundancy just in case any of the options was blocked.

We also visited the Drei Echelon museum which gave us access to tunnels under the old buildings of Fort Thungen. Outside we wandered around the walls and foundations of another fortress before venturing inside to the museum. It had a great display of awful portraits. We couldn’t work out whether artists were particularly rubbish or the subjects very oddly proportioned. As we got further through the museum we realised these were the Habsburgs who had also once had control of the city. The famous Habsburg jaw was a result of inbreeding and presumably the artists hadn’t been that bad after all.

The museum had an excellent 3-D map of the city that bought to life it’s interesting topographical character as well as showing how it had grown and developed over time.

Parting Thoughts

The Casemates and old forts were some of the more dramatic of the attractions in the city, but we also spent plenty of time just wandering around, occasionally stopping for a bite to eat from a cafe or a food stall. 

The city felt very cosmopolitan. The streets were clean, but it didn’t feel too scrubbed and polished. It was obviously popular with tourists and was equally popular with us. We don’t like visiting too many cities but it was so easy to visit, with plenty of green spaces to explore when we had tired of buildings and history.

We would definitely recommend a visit to anyone looking for a city break.

A few final photos from our collection.

Corridor of Sculptures in the Justice Quarter