Vianden

Vianden is a castle from a storybook on a rock above a river town in the Ardennes: the counts of Vianden built it from the eleventh century in Romanesque and then Gothic, it fell to ruin after a nineteenth-century sale for scrap, and the Grand Duke gave it to the state in 1977 to be rebuilt whole — so that today it stands complete, roofed and towered, above the Our, on the border with Germany. Victor Hugo, in exile in 1871, lived in a house by the bridge and drew the ruin from his window; a chairlift now rises from the town to a hilltop that shows the castle entire, which is the reason it was built.

The traveller climbs the Grand-Rue from the river to the castle and walks its halls, chapel and knights' room; rides the chairlift up the eastern hill for the view of the castle in its valley and walks down through the forest; visits Hugo's house and stands at his window; follows the medieval walls and their towers around the town; walks the Our path north toward the dam; and, on a summer day, sits by the river with a bottle of Moselle and the castle overhead — the whole excursion is a day from Luxembourg City, and worth two if the forest calls.

The Guide's honesty: Vianden is small — a town of two thousand — and its charm is the castle and the setting, so come for those and expect a village around them; the chairlift closes in winter and in wind; the medieval festival in August fills the castle with knights and the town with visitors; the bus from Luxembourg City takes an hour and is free, as all public transport in the country is; and the Ardennes around it are for walking, quietly, which the town has never tried to change.