With its contrasting styles of building, the city of Luxembourg is an architectural treat, writes Emma Cullinan
As you arrive in Luxembourg town, a vision of Disneyland appears: turreted castles, an ancient fortress and a series of Renaissance manors and churches all sit atop a rocky promontory. A cliff face that drops into a valley adds to the drama. These extremes of topography are in an improbably small area. It all makes for a beautiful town, full of dinky streets opening onto squares. For a broader view you can walk to the edge of the high part of town and look down into the valley. That's where the prisoners used to live, festering in the lowlands; the smart folks always lived on the hill (just as they did in Dublin, in Howth and Killiney), away from disease-prone bogs and sewers. But, as elsewhere, things have changed: Luxembourg's former Grund area - the name translates as "the Bottom" - has become hip.
Yet Luxembourg doesn't feel big on vice. Indeed, it promotes itself as a safe destination. Perhaps this is to encourage a certain type of visitor, in keeping with the mature, civilised surroundings. (Some might say unexciting, even verging on boring, but they're probably not the type of visitors that Luxembourg wants.) There aren't many young people around, apparently. This may be because Luxembourg doesn't have a university, which means they leave the duchy to study. On the other hand, many people come here to work.
Luxembourg has had some forceful visitors in the past: the French, Germans and Dutch have all occupied it. The result is that most shopkeepers will speak French with you, and in business you may use German, even though the national language is Luxemburgish.
Luxembourgers are accommodating like that. They even gained independence without a fight when, in 1839, the Treaty of London made the duchy self-governing. (It had been given pseudo independence, with The Netherlands attached, in 1815). Since then the duchy, with its 400,000 inhabitants, has coped just fine on its own, becoming rich through steel and banking. A need to house all that money - and to accommodate European Union gatherings - led to the creation of Kirchberg, a futuristic business enclave on former farming land next to Luxembourg city.
Who knows what Léon Krier, one of the duchy's best-known sons, makes of it? When the renowned city planner was 17, he persuaded his family to come with him to Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation, in the French city of Marseilles. The huge apartment complex - akin to a city in the sky, with shops, playground and swimming pool - had been hailed as a stunning building. Krier's parents were horrified by it, as was the young Léon - although, as he admits now, he pretended for years to like it.
But the experience precipitated a return to his roots in historic Luxembourg: "I felt I had no choice but to learn from buildings, towns and landscapes which I had experienced and loved," he has said. Krier has since gone on to espouse "new urbanism", fighting what he sees as the tendency of modernism to brush out what went before. One of his projects was to plan Poundbury, Prince Charles's Utopian village in the southern English county of Dorset.
So Luxembourg offers an architectural and planning treat. You can wander around the old town to see how a civilized, pretty urban centre works, with its coffee-shop-lined squares and Renaissance-style churches, where skateboarders roll along unhindered by pavement nodules and street furniture.
Cake shops sell cakes that taste of their ingredients, such as strawberries, rather than the puffed-up, chemically-enhanced concoctions we're often fobbed off with in Ireland. Luxembourgers like to dine well, and they have a constellation of Michelin-starred restaurants. You can lord it in a smart restaurant at lunchtime for a reasonable sum, as many offer fixed-price menus.
Having experienced the historic centre of Luxembourg city, you need to don hiking boots - or, at least, take a bus - to check out the contemporary architecture on the hill in Kirchberg, as the buildings are laid out over quite a few kilometres. There have been attempts to reduce the scale of the business district, which was started in the 1960s, with a motorway running through it. (This was at a time when the car was king: even in Dublin rumours circulated of plans to knock down Christ Church's arch, to slash a motorway through the city.) Now the Kirchberg highway has become a tree-lined avenue. This makes more sense in the country that gave rise to the world's most famous city planner, who believes towns should be designed on a human scale.
Some of Kirchberg's office buildings are unchallenging, but others are clever. There's the curved Philharmonic Hall, clad in a wave of cedar slats. There's the National Sports and Cultural Centre, whose series of domes makes it look like a lunar city. IM Pei, who designed the glass pyramid at the Louvre, is building another one in Kirchberg, to house a museum of modern art. Other big names have worked here too: Denys Lasdun, who designed the National Theatre in London, designed a bank here in 1973, and an extension to it in 1990, with characteristic concrete terraces. The US architect Richard Meier also designed a bank, which was built here in 1993. The white-walled building, made up of circles and rectangles, contrasts with a steel sculpture by Meier's friend Frank Stellar, in front of the building, which resembles a mix of cars that have been put through a crusher.
This is all such a contrast to the old town, where, on the way to the cathedral, I see a group of bakers, dressed in white outfits complete with crisp cotton hats, handing out pretzels from baskets. More deliciously Disney-like behaviour.
Luxair flies daily between Dublin and Luxembourg (with a stop in Manchester). www.luxair.co.uk