Ville-Haute
The UNESCO old town, on the plateau. Place Guillaume II, the Casemates, the cathedral, the parliament. This is where Relais Louvigny and Guillaume Suites sit.
The plateau is where the country began. In 963, Count Siegfried built a small fort — Lucilinburhuc, the “little castle” — on the Bock promontory, and the city grew around it. Today the Ville-Haute is a compact pedestrian plateau of pale sandstone and slate, its medieval street grid opening without warning onto sheer drops over the Alzette and Pétrusse valleys. The old town and its fortifications have been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1994.
You can cross it in twenty minutes and still not exhaust it: the Bock Casemates, the network of defensive tunnels that earned the fortress its nickname of the Gibraltar of the North; the Grand Ducal Palace, once the city hall, with its changing of the guard; Notre-Dame cathedral, begun as a Jesuit church in 1613; and Place Guillaume II, which everyone here calls the Knuedler, after the knotted cord belts of the monks whose monastery once stood on it.
Two of our four houses keep their addresses here, a few minutes apart. Relais Louvigny sits on Rue Louvigny, with a bathtub in every apartment; Guillaume Suites is on Rue du Curé, the only one of our houses with air conditioning, and the Giallo restaurant is on its ground floor. From either door, the cathedral, the Saturday market on Place Guillaume II and the ramparts are a short walk.
