Les citadelles mosanes

The Meuse Citadels TWHS comprises the fortified areas of the Walloon cities of Namur, Huy and Dinant. The river Meuse, which runs from France to the North Sea via Belgium and The Netherlands, used to be a natural border and offered strategic points of defense. The fortifications developed from Roman times til the 2nd half of the 20th century, when land territory warfare became of less importance.

On my day trip to Namur late January 2021 I of course visited its citadel, the major landmark of this city. There are Roman origins here as well, but the major stone wall construction started in the late Middle Ages. From the 16th century onwards these defense works were built here, among others in the 17th century under the direction of the well-known French military architect Vauban and later by the Dutch.

From the city center the Citadel is easy to access on foot via one of the bridges over the river Sambre. It is huge and a brisk walk is needed to climb up the ramp: the defense structures stand on a 100m high hill. The main grounds are freely accessible, only the former Terra Nova barracks are in use as a museum nowadays. There is also a system of underground passages (closed because of Covid).

Having walked to the very tip of the Citadel I was surprised to find a gigantic modern statue there. It is Searching for Utopia by the Belgian artist Jan Fabre. The 5m long …

We visited the Citadelles at Namur and Dinant over the last couple of days. Whilst both do warrant a visit, they offer quite different experiences.

The citadelle in Namur is undoubtedly impressive and we thoroughly enjoyed exploring it over a couple of hours. We were unsure beforehand how much of the citadelle we would be able to see without paying the entrance fee, so we started our walk from the street level in town, walking up the steps past the fabulous artwork called 'Searching for Utopia' (the turtle). As it happens, we just kept going up and up, admiring the views from the edges down over the town, rivers and the river confluence. Eventually we reached the visitor centre, but we still had access to the citadelle without paying anything, so kept going until we exited at the top. I believe that the entrance fee is payable only if you wish to join a guided tour of the site, or a tour of the underground passageways, meaning the rest of the site is free to explore.

There is a lot of work going on in Namur currently, both to restore the citadelle walls and within the town itself, especially around the river confluence area where new buildings are going up and a new, modern, pedestrian bridge is being built. Therefore it was hard to think of the town as being particularly scenic or pretty, however a grey, wet day in February is probably not the best time of …

July 2018 - on our trip to France we passed the Wallony. In the evening we still could see Huy, in the morning we took an extensive walk around the citadel of Namur. It is quite impressive. WHS status however, I am not sure. In Namur, you can spend easily an hour on the citadel. Interesting is also some artwork here. The golden turtle for instance. From up there you have a good view at the city and can also see the belfries (another WHS)

I visited Dinant several times and if I had to choose I'd always choose it over Namur, although the fortifications in Namur are worth visiting (perhaps not revisiting though). The highlight of my trip was to kayak there, passing by several fortifications.

Unfortunately we had already booked all the hotels for our tour of Belgium when the new TL of this country appeared on the Internet and we couldn't do anything to change radically our itinerary!!! This made me quite angry because the Tentative Lists often change only once every ten year and it had happened in the most inconvenient moment (and something similar already had happened before our tour of Spain!). However in the end we saw all the new sites but often too much badly, quickly and only some components of them.

This is the most typical case: we had the time only to view, even quite accidentally, the citadel of Namur, where we had booked a hotel, from the Pont de l'Évêché, in the late evening. Here we saw the impressive fortifications of the castle, the oldest part of the citadel with a watchtower standing out, high on a hill in front of us. Nothing else! Maybe in the future we will visit the citadel well, along with Dinant and Huy.