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Published: March 4th 2011
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Tuesday 1 March 2011
Today was a day of castles! We spent three hours exploring Vianden castle in the morning. As we mentioned last time, the restoration of the castle is ongoing and they've done a pretty good job thus far (there was a pretty serious concrete pour going on while we were there). By the look of the 3D models on display, there was an awful lot of the castle missing by the time they started restoring. It's not been an easy task by the look of it - the castle has had many incarnations, and it looks like they've had to make some difficult decisions. For example, the chimney of one of the kitchens could not be fully restored because they also wanted to restore a bedroom from a different era which was located above it. Most of the rooms are fairly bare, but some have been very effectively decorated with period (i.e. middle ages) furniture, tapestries and such. There are some really cool suits of armour on display as well as weaponry of the time.
It's understandable why the Dutch king thought the castle would be hard to heat. Today, there is electric heating in many rooms
and most of the windows have been sealed with perspex or glass. In areas where the windows are still open to the elements however, it was absolutely freezing (there was a strong wind blowing straight off the Arctic!).
After leaving Vianden castle, we went for a bit of drive on small back roads through farmland, forest and lots of little (and some not so little) villages. More than 80% of the half million or so population of Luxembourg live in such villages and towns. It's amazing just how many towns there are - squeezed into the 2,500 square kilometres that is Luxembourg (that's about 35 times SMALLER than Tasmania!).
One such village is Bourscheid, which of course has a castle! In this case though, the village looks down on the castle which in turn looks down over a huge valley. This one dates from the 12th century and has not been restored to the extent of Vianden's so it's great clambering over the ruins, trying to imagine what it would have looked like. (They have really great crisps in the castle 'caf' - paprika flavoured - mmm!)
Next stop, in the fading light, was Esch-sur-Sûre. This teeny-tiny
village sits in a loop of the Sûre River wrapped around a rocky outcrop on which sits the remains of - yes! - another castle (927 AD!). After a bit of driving around we finally found a way up to part of the castle, where we ooh'd and aah'd over the delightful views of the town and valley alongside Saint Katarine (well, her statue anyway).
When we got back to Vianden, we headed down to the hotel's pizzeria/italian restaurant for the third time (as the food's been so good). However, everyone has to have a day off and today was theirs! Instead, we crossed the road and ate at the slightly flasher restaurant at the "Grand Hotel de Vianden" (which was great).
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The Travel Camel
Shane Dallas
This is a lovely photo, makes me feel I'm actually there.