The Casemates of Luxembourg

Thursday was a holiday and I was invited to tag-along on a trip to Luxembourg.  A friend of mine, Nicole, offered to give an Irish exchange student and his friend a tour of Luxembourg.  We got to see more of the 'castle' - something I found supremely cool.

Gibraltar of the North, the old castle Luxembourg, is a geological gift from Ares, the god of war. Grammar.

There is a 'peninsula' - if you will- of cliff-ed stone right next to a river valley.  This outcropping is what was turned into a fortress as early as the 10th century.  The model below attempts to show the outcropping and primitive fort:

Here is the modern day view looking down this peninsula of rock in a green sea of trees.

The first Casemates of Luxembourg were built by the Spanish in 1644.  They were continually expanded by each subsiquent occupier (Austrians in 18th century) and now stretch over 23km underground.  In 1867, they were abandoned in the name of neutrality, but this here brochure says they weren't able to destroy them for fear of collapsing parts of the city that was build above them.

Here is a view into the lower peasant city of Grund (literally: ground).

During the two world wars, as many as 35,000 people took shelter in the Bock Casemates during air-raids:

The main Casemates I walked through are from the mid 18th Century.

Pretty views:

We did a lot of walking up and down hills.

GoPro probably took 3000 pictures:

I really fell in love with the views from the bridge, which looked up at the tunnels and fortress we started our trip inside of:

Unfortunately I spent the majority of the trip sneezing

Because everything was in bloom.

There was a cool little museum on clothing from Eastern Europe:

And we went to the royal palace (again for me):

And we played around in the park below the city:

This kid wasn't amused that we were climbing on 'his' rockclimbing wall: