A cheap flight from Nice, a newly reopened Marriott, free public transport and a freezing first encounter with Europe’s most understated capital
Some journeys begin with one destination. This one began with a sequence.
My New Year trip had started in Nice and would continue through Luxembourg, Brussels, Bordeaux and Paris. New Year’s Eve itself was reserved for Bordeaux, but before that came a rapid succession of cities, countries, flights and trains.
Luxembourg was the second stop.
I had never visited the country, which was reason enough to include it. The logistics made the decision even easier: a direct Volotea flight from Nice cost, as far as I remember, somewhere between €50 and €80 with cabin baggage.
It was an unusually convenient way to add a new country to the journey.
There was another incentive. The Luxembourg Marriott Hotel Alfa had opened only a few months earlier, directly opposite the capital’s main railway station. A new country and a new Marriott on the same night sounded efficient enough to justify the stop.
What I had not properly considered was the weather.
After an evening on the French Riviera, Luxembourg in late December felt less like the next stage of the same journey and more like an unscheduled transfer to the North Pole.
Luxembourg made an excellent first impression before I had seen a single historic building.
The tram from the airport stopped almost directly outside my hotel. More remarkably, the ride cost nothing.
Since March 2020, Luxembourg’s buses, trams and second-class domestic trains have been free for residents and visitors alike. It became the first country in the world to introduce free public transport nationwide. The airport extension of the tram opened on 2 March 2025, meaning it had been operating for less than a year when I arrived.
There were no ticket machines to understand, transport zones to decode or applications to download. I collected my luggage, boarded the tram and got off opposite the hotel.
For a country associated with banking, European institutions and considerable wealth, the most immediately impressive luxury was not marble or gold. It was the ability to travel without having to think about paying for it.
I reached the Luxembourg Marriott Hotel Alfa shortly after 10:30.
The timestamp on my first room photograph is 10:58. By then, I had already checked in, received an upgrade, dropped my luggage and begun inspecting the room.
That was not merely an early check-in. The hotel’s official check-in time was 16:00, meaning I had been given my upgraded room roughly five hours ahead of schedule. For a stay lasting only one night, that level of efficiency mattered considerably more than a ceremonial welcome at the normal hour.
The hotel was new as a Marriott, but the building was not.
The original Hotel Alfa opened in 1932 and became one of the best-known Art Deco buildings in the station district. It later closed, underwent a long restoration and reopened as the Luxembourg Marriott Hotel Alfa on 20 May 2025. The protected building has been classified as a national monument since 1991, and the reopening marked the debut of the main Marriott Hotels brand in Luxembourg.
That combination suited the city: a modern international hotel operating inside a building connected to an older, more complicated Luxembourg.
My room was spacious and polished, with restrained Art Deco references rather than an attempt to reproduce the 1930s. The most attractive detail was a curved sofa positioned beside the window.
At that point, it looked like an elegant decorative feature.
Several hours later, after walking through Luxembourg in the December cold, it would look like one of the greatest achievements of European civilisation.
The hotel had an M Club lounge for eligible elite members, a restaurant, a bar and a fitness centre. What it did not have was a pool, sauna or spa. Marriott lists a 24-hour gym as its only fitness and recreation facility.
Normally, that omission would not have bothered me. After arriving from the Riviera and wandering through what felt like a frozen northern outpost, a hot sauna would have been more useful than every treadmill in the building combined.
Once I had settled into the room, I used the free public transport again.
A bus took me toward Notre-Dame Cathedral, where I began the walking part of the visit. I saw the cathedral only from the outside before continuing through the upper city.
Luxembourg’s historic centre was attractive, clean and carefully maintained. It was also smaller and less imposing than I had expected.
That expectation may have been unfair.
Luxembourg is routinely associated with extraordinary wealth, international finance, European institutions and a standard of living that makes much of the continent look financially undisciplined. Somewhere in my mind, all of that had translated into monumental avenues, oversized public buildings and architecture designed to demonstrate prosperity at every turn.
Instead, the centre felt restrained.
Place Guillaume II, the Town Hall, the surrounding streets and the government buildings were elegant, but rarely grand. The city did not attempt to overwhelm visitors with scale.
The remaining Christmas decorations softened the official surroundings. Wooden stalls and lights were still in place several days after Christmas, suspended between the holiday that had ended and the New Year still to come.
The market looked inviting in photographs.
In reality, it was cold enough to make every outdoor activity feel like a test of character.
The Grand Ducal Palace stands directly within the old city, surrounded by ordinary streets rather than enormous gardens or an isolated royal compound.
The building is ornate, and the guards remove any doubt about its significance, but its scale reflects Luxembourg’s particular version of monarchy.
Luxembourg is not a semi-autonomous territory attached to a larger kingdom. It is a fully sovereign state. The difference between a kingdom and a grand duchy is primarily historical and dynastic: its monarch is called a Grand Duke rather than a king.
In the traditional hierarchy of European titles, a grand duke ranked below a king but above an ordinary duke. That distinction does not make modern Luxembourg less independent than a kingdom.
The title originated at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, when Luxembourg was elevated from a duchy to a grand duchy and placed in personal union with the Netherlands. The Dutch king was simultaneously King of the Netherlands and Grand Duke of Luxembourg, but the two territories were legally distinct.
The Treaty of London in 1839 established Luxembourg in approximately its present form, although a large western part of the historical territory became the Belgian Province of Luxembourg. The remaining Grand Duchy gradually developed its own institutions and national identity. The personal union with the Netherlands finally ended in 1890 because the two states followed different succession rules: Wilhelmina inherited the Dutch throne, while Luxembourg passed to Adolphe of the Nassau-Weilburg branch.
Why did the country not simply rename itself a kingdom after becoming fully independent?
The simplest answer is that it did not need to. The title of Grand Duchy already carried complete sovereignty, and changing it would have added ceremony rather than political power. Luxembourg retained the title created in 1815, preserving the historical and dynastic continuity around which the modern state had developed.
Today it remains the world’s only sovereign Grand Duchy. It is a representative democracy and constitutional monarchy in which sovereignty resides in the nation, while the Grand Duke serves as head of state within constitutional and parliamentary limits.
There was also a remarkably recent detail. Guillaume had become Grand Duke on 3 October 2025, less than three months before I walked past the palace.
Had I judged Luxembourg only by its central squares, palace and cathedral, my conclusion would probably have been that it was pleasant but underwhelming.
The city became more interesting when I reached the edge of the upper town and looked down.
Luxembourg’s character does not come primarily from one palace, cathedral or grand boulevard. It comes from the relationship between its upper city, defensive cliffs, river valleys and neighbourhoods far below.
Roads curved beneath stone walls. Church towers rose from the valley. Houses appeared stacked across several levels, while bridges connected areas that looked close on a map but were separated vertically by a considerable distance.
The old quarters and surviving fortifications have been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1994. The Bock and Pétrusse Casemates formed part of an underground defensive network that originally extended for around 23 kilometres, helping earn Luxembourg the nickname “Gibraltar of the North.”
I did not enter the casemates on this visit.
Instead, I descended into Grund.
Grund lies beneath the upper city beside the Alzette River. The descent changed the atmosphere almost immediately.
The administrative capital disappeared.
There were no ceremonial façades or guarded palaces, only quiet streets, stone walls, old houses and water. From below, the upper city appeared more dramatic than it had from within.
This was the Luxembourg I had not expected.
The city was still compact, but no longer visually simple. Its different levels created the impression of several towns occupying the same small area.
Grund felt intimate and almost provincial, while the buildings above represented government, finance and the European institutions that had given modern Luxembourg much of its international importance.
I walked along the lower streets and river before using a public lift to return to the upper level.
Once again, Luxembourg had found a practical solution to its geography. It had inherited a city built for defence and adapted it for people who would prefer not to climb back up every cliff they had just descended.
By then, however, practicality could do only so much.
The cold had won.
I had considered going out again after dark.
That plan did not survive the afternoon.
After several hours outside, the difference between the French Riviera and Luxembourg no longer felt like a matter of latitude. It felt personal.
By the time I returned to the hotel, several vulnerable parts of my anatomy had formally rejected the idea of another winter walk.
The curved sofa beside the window, decorative only a few hours earlier, had become an object of deep emotional significance.
So had the M Club lounge.
The lounge served a generous selection of charcuterie, cheese, bread, radishes and several types of pâté and terrine.
One slice resembled a version of Rieslingspaschtéit, Luxembourg’s traditional meat pie made with a marinated meat filling and Riesling jelly. I cannot confirm that this was exactly what the hotel served, but the resemblance was strong enough to provide at least a small introduction to the country’s culinary tradition.
It was not an exhaustive exploration of Luxembourgish cuisine, but at that point warmth mattered more than gastronomic scholarship.
From the hotel, I could look directly across at Luxembourg’s main railway station. Its clock tower and enormous illuminated window were considerably more impressive at night than the surrounding district had appeared during the day.
The station became my final view of the city.
The sofa became my evening programme.
A spa would have improved the situation considerably, but the hotel had already performed well enough: a free tram almost to the entrance, an upgraded room five hours early, a useful lounge and a railway station directly across the road.
For a one-night stay, it was difficult to ask for a more efficient base.
The next morning required almost no planning.
After breakfast, I checked out, crossed the street and boarded the train toward Brussels.
Luxembourg and Brussels are linked by the InterCity route through Arlon and Namur. International tickets are required beyond the border, but the free Luxembourg section reduces the cross-border fare, helping explain why the journey can be surprisingly affordable for the distance involved.
I no longer remember the precise ticket price, only that it had not been expensive enough to complicate the itinerary.
That mattered. Luxembourg worked particularly well as part of this journey because both arrival and departure were simple: a relatively cheap flight from Nice, free transport from the airport, a hotel opposite the station and a direct train toward Brussels the following morning.
It was travel logistics behaving exactly as they should.
One night was enough for a first impression. It was not enough to understand Luxembourg properly.
I had missed the interiors of the cathedral and the palace, the Bock and Pétrusse Casemates, a more systematic walk along the fortifications and the panoramic lift at Pfaffenthal.
I had also seen almost nothing of modern Luxembourg.
A future visit would need to include Kirchberg, the European institutions, the Philharmonie and Mudam, the contemporary art museum built beside the remains of Fort Thüngen. The modern architecture of Kirchberg would provide a useful contrast to the old fortress city and the narrow streets around the palace.
Those omissions changed my final judgment.
Luxembourg had not appeared as grand as I expected. Its centre was smaller and quieter, and its major buildings less monumental than the reputation of the country had led me to imagine.
But I had also arrived with the wrong criterion.
The city is not at its best when judged by the size of its palace or the width of its squares. Its appeal lies in the landscape beneath them: the cliffs, bridges, defensive remains, riverside districts and abrupt movement between different urban levels.
I had included Luxembourg because I had never visited the country, because the flight from Nice was affordable and because a new Marriott had opened opposite the station.
I left wanting to return for reasons that had nothing to do with collecting another country or testing another hotel.
Its history was more complicated than I had realised. Its structure was more unusual than it first appeared. And beneath the restrained surface, there was clearly much more of the city left to understand.
Preferably in warmer weather.
