Echternach, Luxembourg Summary

Now a town of some 4000 people, ECHTERNACH grew up around an abbey founded here in 698 by the English missionary St Willibrord. The centre is the wedge-shaped place du Marché, an elegant conglomeration of ancient buildings, notably the fifteenth-century turreted Town Hall, with its Gothic loggia of 1520. The town’s real attraction is, however, the abbey itself, just north of place du Marché, signalled by the spires of its enormous church, rebuilt to a former eleventh-century plan after heavy bomb damage in 1944. The most diverting part of the interior is the crypt dating from around 900, its walls bearing some antique frescoes and the primitive coffin of the saint himself, covered by an ornate, modern canopy. The huge abbey complex spreads out beyond the church to a set of formal gardens by the river, its mainly eighteenth-century buildings now given over to secular activities. One houses the Musée de l’Abbaye (daily: April-June & Sept-Nov 10am-noon & 2-5pm; July & Aug 10am-6pm; €2), with stone fragments from St Willibrord’s original foundation and the eleventh-century _ Codex Aureus_ of Echternach, whose superb jewelled cover, from 990, was the work of a Trier craftsman.