Esch-sur-Alzette. It is not beautiful and dreamy Luxembourg, with its protected fortresses and fairytale castles, that we want to talk about. Here we want to tell about other towers. And they are high towers of iron and steel, which stand out rusty and severe of pipes and sheets, on the dull and still roaring bases of blast furnaces like mysterious infernal caverns. Looking at them comes to mind Orpheus, irresistibly attracted to his Eurydice who here stretches out of iron and burning shadows. And it is an unexpected attraction. The Luxembourg you would never imagine is here in Esch-sur-Alzette, in the southern region of the Grand Duchy, almost 40 minutes by train, free, from the capital.
Esch-sur-Alzette, European Capital of Culture 2022
Here, in the heart of Europe, steel was forged hard, the components of which came from the strenuous mines of the surroundings. Today culture is produced here, and it is done at the highest levels. Esch-sur-Alzette is the European Capital of Culture for 2022, because its enhancement of industrial culture, which so much has in the history of European construction, has its splendid focus here.
Blast furnaces and chimneys
The blast furnaces turned off here are counterbalanced by university pavilions designed by the best minds in Europe and beyond; the forges of the past, now ruined, have been dissected from gardens and ponds on which joyful terraces open up. The chimneys of the past, deprived of smoke, swarm with visitors who, like enamored ants, climb up to the panoramic peaks of a new city of colored architecture and mirrored facades.
The miners
In the past, miners came here from Poland, Italy, neighboring France and Portugal. The legacy of this distant past a few decades can be found here in the melting pot of languages that resonate everywhere, in the city there are now students and tourists. The industrial past remains, confined to the few workshops still active, while bulldozers and cranes remove the remnants of a polluted past which here transforms into sparkling parks among the contemporary architecture of Esch-Belval.
You can visit it by bicycle or even through guided tours with treasure hunts along a 6.4 km route, the Cité des Scienses, de la Recherche et de l’Innovation. Here it is the university that represents the new pulsating center, while just outside – with the border with France close and “indefinite”, so much so that the common French neighbors in the project of European capital are squeezed together – are the old workshops that have been transformed in exhibition spaces and cultural aggregation centers. One for all, the Kulturalfabrik. To mark the landscape here are the facades with the painted murals and the gates open to visitors. You enter, and it is a swarm of artists and initiatives. From plastic arts, to cinema to theater, to video art, there are performers from all over.