This is another day tour option from Brussels, Belgium. I wanted to add another new country to my list on this trip, and the beautiful Luxembourg City was on my list! Our tour was with Brussels City Tours, and was booked through Trip Advisor. Dinant wasn’t on my radar, but this turned out to be a very picturesque city and a surprisingly fun little stop. Luxembourg City is the capital of Luxembourg (the wealthiest, yet one of the smallest countries in Europe), and it’s small city center is considered a UNESCO World Heritage Site due to it’s well-preserved fortifications and historical buildings.
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Here is a sample day trip to Dinant and Luxembourg based on our trip with young adults in March:
We based out of Brussels, Belgium for four days which is a great choice as a central location that you can do many day trips from (Cologne, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Bruges, Ghent, and more!). The bus for this day trip left from the same location as our trip the day before, so we were able to walk from our hotel. Luxembourg City is about 2.5 hours from Brussels, and with a stop in Dinant, Belgium on the way, this makes for about a 12 hour day in total. We departed at 8:30AM on a coach bus that fit about 60 people and drove a little over an hour to our first stop, the tiny village of Dinant.
Dinant is situated just 12 miles North of France, and is home to about 14,000 people. Even though it’s a small city, there are several notable highlights! The city was first inhabited in the 7th century, and houses the Collegiate Church of our Lady, and the Dinant Citadel that sits high above the church on a limestone cliffs (there’s a great story about how these cliffs were formed!). There are some really nice photo opportunities here from the other side of the river.
Our guide gave us an overview of the history of the city, we took a walk through the cathedral, and then walked past the birthplace of Adolphe Sax, a musician and inventor of the saxophone in the 1840’s. We were given some free time to explore the city and grab a snack…we chose Cafe Leffe, which overlooked the river and was a great spot for a warm drink on a chilly morning.
After meeting up with the rest of the group, we made a stop on the way out of town to take pictures of the cliffs and listen to the tale of how they were formed. It was a very tight squeeze to fit the bus between these two cliffs! Then back in the bus for another 1.5 hour drive to Luxembourg City…
As we approached Luxembourg City, there were some pretty amazing views of the city from a distance…don’t snooze and miss it! It was about 1:30PM by the time we arrived in the city and we were starving, but first we had a brief tour with our guide so we could get to the city center and familiarize ourselves with the area. We were given some free time to get lunch on our own, so we chose the nearest Italian restaurant we could find, Bella Ciao, which turned out to be a great choice for pizza, pasta, and a glass of wine!
After lunch, we met back up with the group and our guide and continued to explore Luxembourg City, passing through the Cathedral Notre-Dame, Ville Haute, the Grand Ducal Palace (residence of the Grand Duke of Luxembourg), and then finally making our way down to the lower part of Luxembourg City through Neumunster Abbey. The architecture throughout the city still has a Gothic feel in parts, but also more modern European areas like Ville Haute that are reminiscent of Paris. It’s all very clean and safe as well.
After touring with our guide, we were given another 1-2 hours to continue to explore on our own. Since the city is quite small, we really didn’t have enough to do and would have preferred to head back to Brussels at this point, but at least we got our steps in for the day (and then some)! After wandering around the shops and grabbing a final snack, it was back to the bus and a 2-hour journey back to Brussels, arriving right around 9:00PM. Luxembourg is definitely worth a visit and I would do it again, but one day is plenty of time to see the city.
