Luxembourg City

May 2025

I decided to do a mini Benelux excursion. We were already in the “Netherlands”, thus, we just had to add Luxembourg and Belgium. We spent one night in each country.

We drove south from Riel and, in 80 minutes, reached the attractive southern city of Maastricht, still in the Netherlands. We did a quick walk around and had a good lunch.

Luxembourg City is two hours south from there. The mountain scenery on the way was very pleasant.

Luxembourg City (population: 136,000), the capital and the biggest city in the country of Luxembourg, was not on my radar sooner because it was known as a high income expensive city to visit. Recently, though, I kept running into the articles describing the beauty of the place. One night won’t break the bank, I decided.

I chose a clean, functional Ibis Styles Hotel ($130) near the main train station mainly because parking our two cars might be easier in that area, which is a bit off from the center but still close enough.

Luxembourg is doing so well financially that they can afford to provide free public transportation for everyone. We happily took advantage of that service and got to the Cathedral, Notre Dame of Luxembourg, shown above. Close to one half of the people of Luxembourg are Catholics.

Luxembourg first became rich because they found large iron ore deposits in the 1840’s, which got the steel industry going – it’s still active to this day. Then they got into financing and banking, including wealth management. Its 766,000 people live very comfortably with a per capital GDP of over $130,000 – #1 in the world. (This number is so high partly because 46% of the workforce live in France, Germany or Belgium and work in Luxembourg, thus, they contribute to the GDP but not counted for the per capita calculation.)

70% of the people of Luxembourg City are foreign born & 160 counties of origin are represented. It definitely is a multicultural city with plenty of well educated professionals.

We ordered two Mezze towers & had a feast. It wasn’t even a top rated restaurant, but the food was as good as at highly rated Mideastern restaurants in the U.S. I guess multicultural means better ethnic food. The final bill was like 20-25 euros per head including drinks. Thanks to the price hikes in the restaurants in the U.S. during and after the pandemic, Americans can be assured they will not be shocked by restaurant bills outside the U.S.

After a satisfying meal, we were too tired to walk back to the museum.

We covered most of this area in a few hours walking extremely slowly taking too many photos.

The next morning we drove down to the area called the Grund District shown on the right hand side of the map. We had noticed a handsome looking abbey there the previous day & I wanted to check it out.

You got a closer view of the fortresses from there. There were many restaurants and bars along that side of the river.

Luxembourg City was surprisingly friendly and we didn’t experience much sticker shock. Now I know, I will not shy away if an opportunity pops up to go there again. Maybe the stay can be even longer than one night.