🇧🇪 Belgium · Wallonia and the Ardennes
Durbuy is a miniature. This little stone town wedged among the forests of the Ardennes, on the banks of the river Ourthe, has boasted for centuries of being 'the smallest city in the world', a charming title that goes back to the city charter a count granted it in the fourteenth century. And although the title is more a historical curiosity than a rigorous fact, the magic is real: a medieval centre of cobbled lanes, ivy-covered stone houses, a stately castle and a bridge over the river, all on a storybook scale.
But Durbuy is as much its surroundings as the town itself. It sits in the very heart of the Belgian Ardennes, a region of rolling forests, rivers, hills and clean air that is the country's great green lung and its destination for nature and adventure. Around Durbuy you can hike, paddle down the Ourthe by kayak, work your way through adventure parks up in the trees, cycle or simply breathe in the calm. At its foot, a curious fold of rock (the 'Durbuy anticline') shows the twisted layers of the earth, quite a geological phenomenon.
This guide covers Durbuy with a practical, warm eye: what to see in the medieval centre, the castle and the topiary park, how to enjoy the nature of the Ardennes (kayaking, hiking, cycling), where to eat well —the area has a fine culinary reputation— and how to get here and get around a rural destination with no station of its own. Whether you come for a few hours or you are after a weekend getaway away from the crowds, Durbuy is a lungful of Ardennes air.
Durbuy grew up around a medieval castle that controlled a ford and a bend in the river Ourthe, at a strategic point in the Ardennes. In 1331, the count of Luxembourg granted it a city charter (urban franchises), from which its fame as 'the smallest city in the world' derives: it received city status despite its minute size. For centuries it was a small feudal stronghold tied to the duchy of Luxembourg and fought over in the wars that ravaged the region, with its castle rebuilt several times. It never stopped being a tiny stone settlement in the middle of the forests. In the twentieth century, with the arrival of tourism, that smallness and its medieval charm became its greatest appeal. All of that is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓French-speaking Belgium in the south: the old prince-bishopric of Liège, Merovingian Tournai, fortified Namur, the forests of the Ardennes and the industrial heartland of coal and steel, cradle of Walloon folklore and of Adolphe Sax.
Read the history of Wallonia and the Ardennes →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Durbuy exists because of the river. On a tight meander of the Ourthe, where the water draws a sharp curve between the wooded hills of the Ardennes, nature formed a place that was easy to defend and to control: a tongue of land protected by the river on several sides, next to a ford and a natural crossing point. In a region of dense forests and rolling ground, where roads were few and difficult, that spot had value, and so it was occupied from early times.
In the Early Middle Ages the Ardennes were a borderland and a corridor between the great powers that shared out the inheritance of the Carolingian Empire. Above the bend of the Ourthe, making use of the rock that overlooks the river, a fortification was raised at some point: the first castle of Durbuy, which controlled the ford and watched over the valley. Around that stronghold, under the shelter of its walls, a small cluster of stone houses began to gather, the seed of the future village.
From the start, Durbuy was tiny: not a great trading city like Liège or Ghent, but a minute feudal settlement wedged between the rock, the river and the forest, whose whole reason for being was the castle. Its history would be that of so many small lordships of the Ardennes: tied to the great duchies of the region, fought over in the wars that ravaged these lands and always small. But a fourteenth-century privilege would give it an unusual title that would make it famous centuries later.
The event that shaped Durbuy's identity for ever happened in 1331. That year, John the Blind, count of Luxembourg and king of Bohemia —one of the great figures of his time and lord of these Ardennes lands— granted Durbuy a charter of franchises that gave it the status of a city. With it, the small settlement gained urban rights and liberties: it could have walls, a market, a degree of autonomy and the prerogatives of medieval 'villes'.
City status did not then depend on size or on the number of inhabitants, but on a legal privilege granted by the lord. That is why Durbuy, with barely a handful of houses squeezed into its river bend, officially became a 'city', legally on the same level as far larger places. That contrast between rank and size is the origin of its famous and rather charming title: 'the smallest city in the world', a label that Durbuy itself would go on to claim with pride and humour in the centuries that followed.
As a city, Durbuy in practice remained a tiny place. Its charter gave it prestige and some rights, but it did not change its nature: it was still a small feudal enclave dependent on its castle and its lords, in the middle of a rural, wooded district. Its economy was modest —farming, livestock, a little craft work and control of the river crossing— and its population minute. But that title of 1331 would stay with it for ever and, in time, would become its main attraction.
Being small did not spare Durbuy from history. Like the whole region of the Ardennes and the duchy of Luxembourg —which passed from the Luxembourgs to the dukes of Burgundy and then to the Habsburgs, becoming part of the Spanish and later Austrian Netherlands— Durbuy was dragged along by the endless wars that ravaged this part of Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The armies fighting over the Low Countries crossed the Ardennes again and again, and the small castle on the bend of the Ourthe went through sieges, captures and destruction.
Durbuy castle was damaged, destroyed and rebuilt several times over the centuries, adapting to the times: from a defensive medieval fortress it became, in more peaceful periods, a seigneurial residence. The noble d'Ursel family became the owners of the castle and the lordship, a link that lasts to this day (the castle is still the private property of that family). The village at its feet was rebuilt after every disaster, always with the same grey stone houses squeezed into what little space there is between the rock and the water.
Through all this time, Durbuy kept its look as a minute, compact settlement. It did not grow, because it could not —geography kept it boxed in— and because there was no economic engine to drive it. While other towns expanded with industry or trade, Durbuy stayed frozen in time, a small medieval village of the Ardennes that, without knowing it, was preserving intact the treasure that would make it famous in the age of tourism: its old-world charm.
After the Napoleonic wars, Durbuy became part, like all of present-day Belgium, first of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands and, from 1830, of the new Belgian state. Through the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth it remained a small, quiet rural village of the Ardennes, living off farming and livestock, away from the main routes and from the industrialisation that was transforming other parts of Wallonia such as the Liège or Charleroi areas.
Its fortunes changed with the rise of tourism in the twentieth century. As Belgians and foreign visitors began looking for nature and rural charm, the Ardennes became the country's great green destination, and Durbuy, with its intact medieval centre, its castle, its river and its famous title of 'smallest city in the world', turned out to be a gem. Its smallness, which for centuries had been a limitation, suddenly became its greatest appeal: a perfectly preserved storybook village, on a miniature scale.
In 1977, with the great reform of Belgian municipalities, the little 'city' of Durbuy was merged administratively with numerous villages and hamlets around it to form a far larger municipality, which today has several thousand inhabitants spread across a wide stretch of the Ardennes. Paradoxically, that made the 'smallest city in the world' the seat of one of the largest municipalities in the country. But the old historic core, the stone Durbuy on the bend of the Ourthe, remained the heart and the magnet of it all.
Today's Durbuy lives off the charm that time handed it. Its old medieval centre, with cobbled lanes, ivy-covered stone houses, the d'Ursel castle on the rock and the bridge over the Ourthe, is one of the most visited and most photographed villages in Wallonia, a target for weekend getaways for Belgians, Dutch visitors and tourists from all over Europe. In high season, the 'smallest city in the world' fills with visitors strolling its tiny streets, buying jams and regional produce and eating in its restaurants.
Because Durbuy is also a food and wellness destination these days. For its size it packs in a remarkable range of charming hotels, spas and good restaurants, some of them well known, which make the most of Ardennes produce —ham, game, trout— to offer a much-admired cooking of the terroir. And a whole active-tourism industry has grown up around it: kayaking on the Ourthe, hiking, cycling, adventure parks with zip lines, which make the area a great natural playground, especially popular with families.
So a village that for centuries was barely a handful of houses around a castle, condemned to smallness by geography, has found in that same smallness and in its beauty frozen in time its reason for being in the twenty-first century. Durbuy is proof that sometimes the tiniest thing is the most valuable: a medieval miniature in the green heart of the Ardennes that still boasts, with a smile, of being the smallest city in the world.