Belval Blast Furnaces

Interesting facts

On 30 April 1953 Jean Monnet set off the first steel casting of the new European Coal and Steel Community at the Belval works.

Furnace B rises about 90 metres and furnace A about 82 metres from base to top.

When it opened, the Belval plant had six blast furnaces and was considered the most modern ironworks in Europe; the first two were fired on 30 October 1911.

Some 39 hectares of the town’s own forest, the Escher Bësch, were cleared to make room for the steelworks in 1909.

In 1913 the works turned out about 361,000 tonnes of steel, and by 1973 some 7,000 people worked at Belval.

Furnace C, the giant that went to China, could produce about 4,300 tonnes of iron a day from a hearth more than 11 metres wide.

Furnace B was the last blast furnace working anywhere in Luxembourg when it was shut down in 1997.

The closure of the blast furnaces freed roughly 120 hectares of industrial land for a new city district.

Furnace A was ceremonially inaugurated in 1965 by the daughter of its chief engineer.

Why it is worth it

The two blast furnaces of Belval are the last of their kind in Luxembourg, a country whose modern wealth was built on the iron ore of its southern "Minett" region. A steelworks was founded here between 1909 and 1912 by the Gelsenkirchener Bergwerks company, and the furnaces that stand today are its final generation: furnace A was fired in 1965 with a daily capacity of about 2,300 tonnes and a hearth eight metres across, furnace B in 1970, larger still, with some 3,000 tonnes a day. A third, furnace C, came on line in 1979.

The end came quickly in the 1990s, as Luxembourg switched to electric-arc steelmaking. Furnace A was stopped in 1995, and the last furnace at Esch-Belval went cold in July 1997. The story of furnace C is the most unusual: it was sold in 1995 to a steel company in Kunming, and from 1996 hundreds of Chinese engineers and workers took it apart piece by piece — more than ten thousand tonnes of steel, each part numbered and packed — to rebuild it in Yunnan province. Furnaces A and B stayed, and in July 2000 they were entered on Luxembourg's supplementary inventory of national monuments.

Around them the former works was turned into a new urban quarter, with the University of Luxembourg's campus and the Rockhal concert venue, and the furnaces were left standing in the middle of it as rust-red landmarks among glass buildings. Since July 2014 furnace A has been open to visitors, either on guided tours or by self-guided visit: a walk leads through the stock house where ore and coke were stored, and stairs climb to a platform about 40 metres up at the level where the charge was loaded, with a wide view over the Minett. Up close, the pipes, hoists and valves give a rare sense of the physical scale of iron-making.

Getting there

Belval is a district of Esch-sur-Alzette, about 2.4 km from the town centre. Luxembourg-Findel International Airport (LUX) is about 24 km away in a straight line. Belval-Université railway station serves the site directly.

Belval Blast Furnaces

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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