Bock Casemates
Interesting facts
- The Bock casemates cover roughly 1,100 square metres, and their 25 gun positions were split between the cliff faces: 12 facing north and 13 facing south.
- Count Siegfried's exchange for the rock was sealed on 7 April 963, when Abbot Viker of St Maximin signed the deed with Emperor Otto I's approval.
- The deed calls the site the castle 'Lucilinburhuc', a name that slowly turned into Lützelburg and finally into Luxembourg.
- In the 1640s the Swiss engineer Isaac von Treybach, working for Spain, divided the rock into three works known as the Large, Middle and Small Bock.
- Vauban's month-long siege of 1684 levelled the Bock's defences completely; he then rebuilt the Large Bock inside a wall about 12 metres high.
- The 'Hollow Tooth' ruin on the Bock is not part of Siegfried's castle but a fortress-gate tower deliberately left half-demolished in 1874 to look romantic.
- Emperor Joseph II toured the Bock casemates in 1781, and Napoleon Bonaparte followed in 1804.
- Across the whole fortress of Luxembourg, some 23 km of underground passages once linked more than 40,000 square metres of bomb-proof space.
- When the fortress was dismantled after 1867, the Bock's gun loopholes were broken open to the larger size they have today.
- The Bock casemates were first opened to the public in 1933.
Why it is worth it
Beneath the eastern tip of Luxembourg's old upper town, a rock spur called the Bock is hollowed out by tunnels and gun chambers. From its cliff face, cannon loopholes look straight down into the Alzette valley, and the galleries behind them are the best-known remnant of a fortress once reckoned among the strongest in Europe.
The story begins in 963, when Count Siegfried acquired a small castle on this promontory from the Abbey of St Maximin in Trier, trading it for land he held at Feulen in the Ardennes. The town of Luxembourg grew up around it. Over the following centuries Burgundians, Habsburgs, Spaniards, French and Prussians fought over the site and kept strengthening it. In the 1640s the Spanish split the rock into three works separated by cuts and joined by bridges; in 1684 Vauban took the city for Louis XIV after a month-long siege and then expanded its defences, treating underground space as seriously as the walls above.
The casemates themselves grew out of the cellars of the medieval castle and were greatly enlarged in 1744 under the Austrian general Neipperg. The main gallery runs about 110 metres and reaches 7 metres in width, with side branches that held 25 gun positions. In wartime the complex could shelter up to 1,200 soldiers and drew water from a 47-metre well. In 1795 the garrison held out against the French for seven months, and Lazare Carnot afterwards ranked Luxembourg second only to Gibraltar — the source of its nickname, the Gibraltar of the North. The 1867 Treaty of London ordered the fortress dismantled, a job that took sixteen years, but the rock galleries remained.
Linking the Bock to the old town is the Pont du Château, built by the Austrians in 1735, which offers four separate ways across: a road on top, a passage through the upper arches, a spiral stair inside the main arch and a tunnel at the bottom. Local tradition places the water-spirit Melusina in the river below. Luxembourg City, capital of the Grand Duchy, sits on cliffs above the Alzette and Pétrusse gorges, and its old quarters and fortifications form a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Getting there
The Bock is in the old town of Luxembourg City, about 0.4 km from the centre. The nearest airport is Luxembourg Airport at Findel (LUX), about 6 km away.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- Belval Blast Furnaces 18.3 km · blast-furnace
On these lists
49.61174, 6.13715per Wikidata