Luxembourg 1

Luxembourg City is one of the most spectacularly sited capitals in Europe, spread across a series of sandstone plateaus high above deep and verdant gorges and because of this impregnability, in former times, it was called " Gibraltar of the North". I started my walk at the Hotel de Ville or Town Hall, built in 1830 in a neo-classical style, and continued on to the Moorish influenced Grand Ducal Palace with its dormer windows and multiple spires. I did a tour of its lavish interior with its dazzling chandeliers, medieval tapestries, richly carved wooden panelling and paintings of previous royal families. Next stop was the Cathédrale Notre-Dame with a beautiful tiled pictorial of St Joseph. Here is quite a lovely photo of the spires of the Cathédral with a monument to local Jews killed by the Nazis in the foreground. I next descended far below and to the east of the Old Town and the ruins of its outer fortifications to the area known as the Grund with the walls of the main citadel rising steeply above. Here I came across the picturesque 17th century Èglise St-Jean with its lovely Baroque altar and gorgeous 14th century transported sculpture of the Black Madonna. Even though I have lunched in some of the world's leading restaurants such as the Savoy Silver Grill in London or Paris's Maxims I am still partial to local fare so I finished the day dining on blutwurst or black sausage, one of Luxembourg's local dishes, and a jug of beer.











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