The Sure's bend
The river looping the base on three sides.
GilPe — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Caranorn — CC BY-SA 4.0 · LBM1948 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · LBM1948 — CC BY-SA 4.0
More than fifty castles and ruins in a country the size of a province, close to the highest concentration in Europe — the result of centuries of contested borders. For a visitor: Vianden first, as the most complete and the most striking, then Bourscheid for the setting and the ruin, then Beaufort to compare a medieval castle and a Renaissance château side by side, then Larochette if you pass it. Four castles in two days is manageable by car.
Sign in to write your review of this place.
No reviews yet — be the first.
Bourscheid Castle is an imposing ruin on a rock spur rising some hundred and fifty metres above the river Sûre, and among the most dramatically sited castles in Luxembourg: the river loops around its base on three sides, and the roads are exposed from the summit in every direction. It was built in the tenth or eleventh century and enlarged repeatedly until it had an outer wall with eleven towers. It was abandoned in the eighteenth century after its owners moved to more comfortable houses, and decayed steadily. Restoration began in the 1970s and remains deliberately partial: the castle is conserved as a ruin rather than rebuilt as a complete castle. That is what makes it different from Vianden. There you see a rebuilt castle with its halls; here you walk between walls open to the sky, stairs that end in air and surviving cellars, and understand what a castle looks like when the centuries are left to it. The view from the upper wall over the bend of the Sûre is the best of it.
The river looping the base on three sides.
A castle as centuries leave it, not as restoration rebuilds it.
Chateau de Bourscheid, 9140 Bourscheid