Visit and Explore Luxembourg

March 2026

One of the unexpected pleasures of living in Luxembourg is realising how much country there is to discover. From the outside, the Grand Duchy looks like a small dot on the map - something you pass through on the way to somewhere else. From the inside, it reveals itself differently: six distinct regions, each with its own character, landscape, and pace; over seventy castles; more than 5,000 kilometres of marked footpaths; a wine valley that most of Europe has never heard of; and a north that feels genuinely remote in a way that surprises people who assumed they had moved to a city-state.

The advantage of living here rather than visiting is time. You do not need to compress Luxembourg into a weekend itinerary. You can take it region by region, season by season, and find that the country keeps offering something new long after you think you have seen most of it.

Luxembourg City: Deeper Than the Old Town

Most expats arrive in or near the capital and spend their first months navigating its most obvious geography — the old town, the Corniche, the Kirchberg plateau. These are worth the attention they receive. The UNESCO-listed fortifications, the Bock Casemates carved into the cliff face, and the vertiginous views from the old city walls down into the Alzette valley are genuinely impressive rather than merely historic.

But Luxembourg City rewards the longer look. The Grund quarter below the old town, with its riverside path and quiet cobbled streets, is at its best on a weekday morning when the tourist coaches have not yet arrived. The Pétrusse valley — a long green park running below the viaduct through the heart of the city — is where residents walk their dogs, run, and generally decompress in a way that the tourist-facing parts of the city do not permit. The Kirchberg plateau, home to MUDAM and the Philharmonie, is worth visiting not just for the institutions but for the architecture surrounding them, which tells its own story about Luxembourg's ambitions as a European capital.

The city also has nine UNESCO-recognised heritage sites in total — spanning architecture, photography, cultural traditions, and nature — which gives even the most well-acquainted resident fresh reasons to look again.

The Mullerthal: Luxembourg's Most Dramatic Landscape

The Mullerthal region in the northeast is the country's most visually striking landscape and, for expats who enjoy walking, its most rewarding destination. The area is a UNESCO Global Geopark, built around a geology of soft sandstone that has been carved over millions of years into gorges, caves, overhangs, and formations that sit somewhere between the beautiful and the strange.

The Mullerthal Trail covers 112 kilometres divided into three circuits, each passing through a different part of the region. None of the individual sections require a full day — many can be completed in three to four hours — which makes the trail ideal for building into weekends gradually rather than committing to it all at once. The Gorges du Loup near Mullerthal village and the rock formations around Berdorf are the most dramatic sections, with narrow passages between sandstone walls that require occasional scrambling and offer genuine seclusion even in the warmer months.

Echternach, the oldest town in Luxembourg, makes the most practical base. Founded around a Benedictine abbey established in the 7th century, the town has a fine central square, good restaurants, and a riverside position on the Sûre that rewards a slow afternoon. The abbey itself is still active and open to visitors.

The Éislek: The Quiet North

The Éislek — Luxembourg's section of the Ardennes plateau in the north — is the part of the country that most expats take longest to reach and tend to return to most often once they do. The landscape is open and unhurried: rolling hills, beech forests, river valleys, and small towns that have not reconfigured themselves around tourism in the way that some southern European equivalents have.

Vianden is the north's most visited town and earns it. The castle, perched above the Our River valley on a rocky promontory, is one of the most thoroughly restored medieval fortifications in the Benelux region, with a history running from the 10th century through to the Grand Ducal family's use of it in more recent times. The town below — particularly on a quiet weekday in spring or autumn — is genuinely lovely. The chairlift above the valley provides an aerial perspective that makes the landscape make sense in a way that the ground-level view does not quite achieve.

Wiltz, further west, is less visited and worth the effort. The town's castle now houses a brewing museum and serves as the main venue for the Festival de Wiltz, held each summer and featuring theatre, dance, and music performances in the castle courtyard. The surrounding countryside is excellent walking territory, and the town itself has the unhurried quality of a place that is not trying to impress anyone.

Clervaux, in the far north, has its own castle containing the Family of Man — a photographic exhibition curated by Edward Steichen and recognised by UNESCO as part of the Memory of the World programme. The exhibition, comprising 503 photographs from 68 countries, was conceived in the 1950s as a meditation on shared human experience and retains a particular power in its permanent home within these castle walls. It is one of those things that Luxembourg has which most people outside the country have never heard of.

The Moselle Valley: Wine, Water, and a Famous Village

The Moselle forms Luxembourg's eastern border with Germany, and the wine-growing region along its banks is one of the most pleasant stretches of countryside in the country — particularly in September and October when the harvest is underway and the vineyards take on their full colour.

The valley produces Riesling, Pinot Gris, Auxerrois, Gewürztraminer, and Crémant — the country's sparkling wine, made in the traditional method and consistently underrated beyond Luxembourg's borders. The road south from Wasserbillig to Schengen follows the river closely, passing through Grevenmacher, Wormeldange, Stadtbredimus, and Remich, each with its own character and its own wineries. The Caves Poll-Fabaire in Wormeldange and the Caves Bernard-Massard in Grevenmacher both offer cellar tours. Most individual domaines along the valley welcome visitors for tastings without the formality that characterises wine tourism in more internationally known regions.

Schengen itself merits a stop beyond its wine. The village where the Schengen Agreement was signed in 1985 — dissolving internal border controls across what is now the Schengen Area — sits at the point where Luxembourg, France, and Germany meet at the river. The European Museum Schengen tells the story of the agreement and the broader project of European integration with more rigour and less triumphalism than the average EU visitor attraction.

The Guttland: Castles in the Valley

The Guttland is the central region of Luxembourg, running between the capital and the northern plateau, and its defining feature is the Eisch Valley — known locally as the Valley of the Seven Castles. Seven fortifications, in various states of preservation, punctuate the landscape along and around the river: Ansembourg, Hollenfels, Septfontaines, Schoenfels, Mersch, Pettingen, and Koerich. Some are inhabited, some are ruins, and some are visible only from a distance as their owners have maintained them privately for generations.

The circular hiking trail connecting them runs roughly 40 kilometres in full, though it divides naturally into shorter sections manageable as day walks. The New Castle of Ansembourg is perhaps the most striking stop — a Baroque country house with formal gardens laid out on terraces above the valley, accessible to visitors even though the castle itself remains a private residence. The gardens in late spring, with the Eisch valley below and the surrounding woodland in full leaf, are the kind of thing that reminds you why people choose to live in this part of Europe.

Mersch, the region's main town, is reachable by train from Luxembourg City in under 20 minutes and makes a practical starting point for any section of the valley trail.

The Minett: Industrial Heritage Reborn

The south of Luxembourg — the Minett, or the Land of the Red Rocks — was for most of the 20th century the country's industrial heartland, home to the iron ore mines and blast furnaces that built Luxembourg's modern prosperity. It is a part of the country that still tends to be underestimated by expats based in the capital, which is increasingly a mistake.

The Belval district in Esch-sur-Alzette has transformed the site of the former steelworks into a mixed-use quarter anchored by the University of Luxembourg's main campus and the Rockhal, the country's largest live music venue. The blast furnace towers have been preserved and are open for guided ascents that offer panoramic views across the border into France. The contrast between the raw industrial scale of the surviving steelwork structures and the contemporary architecture surrounding them is striking in a way that few European industrial heritage sites quite achieve.

The red rock landscape that gives the Minett its informal name comes from the iron-rich geology of the region — the same geology that made it economically valuable for over a century. Walking trails through the Minett Nature Park pass through this distinctive terrain, with views that bear no resemblance to the forested north or the wine valleys of the east and remind you that Luxembourg contains more landscape variety than its size has any right to suggest.

Getting Around

Luxembourg's free public transport network covers the entire country by train, tram, and bus, making it possible to reach most of the destinations described here without a car. The Mullerthal, the Moselle valley, Vianden, and Clervaux are all accessible by train or bus from the capital. For the more rural stretches of the Éislek and the Guttland valley trails, a car gives considerably more flexibility — but the principle that you can explore the country at no transport cost remains genuinely useful.

Luxembourg also has over 800 kilometres of marked cycling routes, and the Moselle valley in particular is among the most enjoyable cycling terrain in the country — flat along the river road, with wineries at regular intervals.

The country is small enough that almost nothing is more than 90 minutes from Luxembourg City. The practical consequence is that exploring all six regions over the course of a year is entirely achievable alongside a normal working life — a weekend afternoon here, a Sunday morning there, and gradually the map fills in and what seemed like a small country reveals itself as a place with considerably more depth than its size implies.
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Check out Visit Moselle
luxembourgexpats.lu/local-business/vacations-and-holidays/visit-moselle
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