The furnaces, in an hour
From the station to the top of the old steelworks and back, past the buildings that kept them fed: a loop of the heart of Belval.
10 stops about 89 min, 39 of them walking a loop
Belval was a steelworks for most of a century. When the last furnace went cold in 1997 the site could have been flattened; instead two of the three blast furnaces were kept, and the university, the concert hall and a whole district were built around them. This walk goes round that heart in about an hour.
Every stop is a place on this site, so each one has its own page, its hours and its photograph. On a phone, press “Where am I on this walk?” at any point and the page tells you which stop you are nearest.
17° and partly cloudy dry for the next 14 hours Walking weather, with a jacket golden hour on the furnaces from 18:58, sunset 19:43 Open-Meteo · 13:23
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Belval-Université station
Start on the platform. Trains from Luxembourg take about half an hour; the station sits at the southern edge of the district, and everything on this walk is within ten minutes of it.
Second class is free everywhere in Luxembourg, so the ticket is not the question.
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3 min on foot
Belval Plaza
The shopping centre is the district’s front door: most people who come to Belval pass through it on the way to the furnaces. Walk through rather than round, and come out on the square on the far side, where the two furnaces stand in front of you.
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3 min on foot
Rockhal
The concert hall that opened while the site was still a building site. On a show night the square outside fills from the early evening; the site’s After the show page lists what is still open when the doors open at the end.
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4 min on foot
The blast furnaces
Furnace A and Furnace B, kept where they stood. Furnace A can be climbed: a stair and a lift take visitors to a platform about forty metres up, with the whole district below and the border with France a field away.
Stand at the foot for a minute before going up. The scale is the point: these are not sculptures, they are machines that were left running one day and switched off the next.
The climb is a separate visit with its own hours; check the furnace page before you plan the whole afternoon around it.
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2 min on foot
Halle des poches à fonte
The hall where the ladles of molten iron were handled after they were tapped from the furnaces. It is a covered open space now, used for markets, fairs and the odd concert, and it is the best place on the walk to see how big the works were.
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3 min on foot
Massenoire
The black house, named for the black tar-and-clay mixture that was prepared here to plug the furnaces’ tap holes. Today it is the reception and exhibition building of the site’s redevelopment, with a permanent exhibition on the transformation of Belval that is the quickest way to understand what you are walking through.
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3 min on foot
Möllerei
The ore hall: the long building where iron ore and coke were mixed before being hoisted into the furnaces. Its shell was kept and a library was built inside it, the Luxembourg Learning Centre, so the room that fed the furnaces now feeds the university.
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3 min on foot
Luxembourg Learning Centre
Go in if it is open: the reading rooms sit inside the old hall and the industrial frame is left visible above the desks. It is the university’s library, but it is a public building, and on a weekday afternoon it is the calmest place in Belval.
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5 min on foot
Maison du Savoir
The university’s main building, with the tower that you can see from the motorway. The ground floor is a street: cafés, a bookshop, the students’ comings and goings. The Maison du Savoir marks the end of the industrial half of the walk and the start of the campus.
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13 min on foot
Parc um Belval
The park on the far side of the campus, where the district gives way to fields. A bench, a view back at the furnaces from the other side, and then the walk back to the station along the boulevard.
From here the station is about ten minutes on foot, and the last trains are printed at the bottom of this page in the evening.
From the last stop, Belval-Université Station is 15 min on foot.
Last trains tonight from Belval-Université: Luxembourg, Gare Centrale 02:57 · Rodange, Gare 03:51 · the live board