Clervaux is one of those towns that look as if they've been drawn: a cluster of white houses with grey roofs tucked into a deep valley in northern Luxembourg, with a gleaming white medieval castle and, up on the hillside, the imposing Benedictine Abbey of St Maurice overlooking the landscape. It lies in the heart of the Ardennes (Éislek), the country's most mountainous and wooded region, and breathes a calm and beauty that contrast with the bustle of the capital.
Its worldwide fame comes from a treasure kept in the castle: 'The Family of Man', the legendary photographic exhibition created by Luxembourg-born Edward Steichen for MoMA in New York in 1955, with more than 500 images by photographers from all over the world about humanity. Permanently installed in Clervaux, it is inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register. It's one of the most moving visits you can make in the country.
This guide explores Clervaux with a practical, warm eye: the castle and 'The Family of Man', the Abbey of St Maurice and its monastic exhibition, the castle's small museums (castle models and the Battle of the Bulge), the parish church and the open-air art trail, plus how to get there (by train, for free) from the capital and how to use Clervaux as a base for discovering the northern Ardennes. A perfect destination for lovers of photography, history and nature.
Clervaux grew up around a medieval castle built around the 12th century by the lords of Clervaux, on a strategic bend of the River Clerve, in the wooded heart of the Ardennes. The town developed under the protection of the fortress and, later, of the great Benedictine Abbey of St Maurice, founded in the early 20th century by monks who came from France. Like the whole north of the country, Clervaux found itself at the centre of the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944-45: the castle was set on fire and the town badly damaged before being rebuilt. Since 1994, the castle has permanently housed 'The Family of Man', Edward Steichen's photographic exhibition inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register. We tell the whole story on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The hilly, wooded north, the Éislek: the Luxembourg of castles (Vianden, Bourscheid, Clervaux) and of the scars of war, with the Battle of the Bulge, the 1942 strike in Wiltz and the Patton memorial.
Read the history of The Ardennes (Éislek) →If you book from here we earn a commission and you pay no more. Prices and availability come from Civitatis.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Like so many villages in the Ardennes, Clervaux grew up in the shelter of a castle. In a tight bend of the river Clerve (or Clerf), in the wooded, rugged heart of northern Luxembourg, the lords of Clervaux built a fortress around the 12th century that controlled the valley and the roads crossing it. The site was ideal for defence: a rocky promontory almost entirely surrounded by the river, hard to storm and easy to watch over.
The line of the lords of Clervaux is documented from the Middle Ages, and it married into other noble houses of the Ardennes and the Eifel. Around the castle, a small town of craftsmen, farmers and merchants slowly took shape, with its church and its market, entirely dependent on the fortress and its lords. Life in this mountainous corner was hard: long winters, poor soil and a subsistence economy based on the forest, livestock and a little farming in the clearings of the valley.
Over the centuries, the lordship of Clervaux changed hands through inheritance and marriage, and the castle was gradually enlarged and transformed, with new wings, towers and courtyards. Like the rest of the Duchy of Luxembourg, the region went through the ups and downs of European history: Burgundian rule, then the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs, the wars of Louis XIV and annexation by revolutionary France. Remote and mountainous, Clervaux nearly always stayed on the sidelines of the great centres of power, but not of the wars that swept through the Ardennes time and again.
Two developments at the turn of the 20th century shaped the identity of Clervaux for good. The first was the arrival of the Benedictine monks. In the early 20th century, a Benedictine community from France, driven out by the anticlerical laws of the Third Republic, settled on the hillside above the village and built the great Abbey of St Maurice and St Maur, an imposing neo-Romanesque complex inspired by Burgundian models and inaugurated in the first decades of the century. The abbey turned Clervaux into a spiritual centre for the north of the country and gave the village its distinctive skyline: the white castle below, the twin-towered church in the middle and the abbey on the heights.
The second development was quieter but had a huge international reach, and it involves a boy from Luxembourg: Edward Steichen. Born in 1879 in Bivange, in the south of the country, and taken to the United States as a small child by his Luxembourgish family, Steichen became one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century: a pioneer of art photography (pictorialism), a fashion photographer and celebrity portraitist, an official photographer in both world wars and, finally, director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
Although Steichen wasn't born in Clervaux, his ties to Luxembourg and his generous gesture ended up linking his masterpiece to this Ardennes village. It was a decision that, decades later, would turn Clervaux Castle into a place of pilgrimage for photography lovers from all over the world.
The most tragic chapter in the history of Clervaux came in the Second World War, and specifically in the Battle of the Bulge (Battle of the Ardennes), the last major German offensive on the Western Front. In December 1944, when many believed the war was all but won, the Wehrmacht launched a massive surprise attack through the snow-covered forests of the Ardennes, aiming to split the Allied armies in two and reach the port of Antwerp.
Clervaux, right on the axis of the offensive, found itself at the heart of the fighting. Between 16 and 18 December 1944, a handful of American soldiers from the 28th Infantry Division held out in the village and the castle against far stronger German forces, in what is known as the Battle of Clervaux or 'the stand at the castle'. Dug in inside the old fortress, the defenders held on until they ran out of ammunition; the castle was set on fire and much of the village was destroyed. Although it ended in local defeat, the resistance at Clervaux helped slow down and disrupt the German timetable, a factor that would prove decisive in the eventual failure of the offensive.
The region wasn't liberated for good until January 1945, after weeks of brutal fighting in extreme cold. Northern Luxembourg paid a terrible price: villages flattened, civilians killed or displaced and a landscape strewn with ruins. Clervaux, like Wiltz, Diekirch and Vianden, had to be rebuilt almost from scratch in the post-war years. The memory of those days is still very much alive in the region, with museums, monuments and remembrance trails across the Ardennes, and Clervaux Castle itself now houses an exhibition dedicated to the battle.
In 1955, Edward Steichen presented the exhibition that would crown his career at MoMA in New York: 'The Family of Man'. It brought together 503 photographs by 273 photographers from 68 countries, chosen from almost two million images, and arranged them not by author or country but by universal themes: birth, love, play, work, family, faith, war, hunger, death, hope. The idea was to show, in the middle of the Cold War and with the Second World War still fresh in people's minds, the essential unity of humankind beyond race, culture and borders.
The exhibition was a resounding success. It toured the world for years in dozens of travelling versions and was seen by millions of people. Proud of his roots, Steichen donated the original collection to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. After a few twists and turns, the exhibition found its permanent home in Clervaux Castle, rebuilt after the war, where it was installed for good and opened in 1994, with the display restored according to its creator's intentions.
In 2003, UNESCO inscribed 'The Family of Man' on the Memory of the World register, which protects documentary heritage of universal value. Today, walking through its rooms in Clervaux is a moving experience: the same images that touched the world in the 1950s still speak of what unites us, and their humanist message resonates powerfully in the 21st century. The exhibition has made this small Ardennes village a landmark in the history of photography.
21st-century Clervaux lives largely from cultural and nature tourism. The rebuilt castle, with 'The Family of Man' as its big draw, attracts visitors from all over the world, and the village has built an identity of its own around photography. For years now, Clervaux has also hosted an open-air contemporary art trail, 'Clervaux – cité de l'image', with large photographs displayed in public spaces in and around the village, renewing its bond with the image and turning the streets into an open-air gallery.
The Abbey of St Maurice is still an active Benedictine community, with its exhibition on monastic life in the crypt, and the twin-towered parish church completes the trio of monuments that makes the Clervaux skyline one of the most recognisable in the country. All around, the Clerve valley and the wooded hills of the Éislek offer ideal terrain for hiking and cycling, increasingly popular with those looking for the rural, peaceful side of Luxembourg.
Well connected by the northern railway line —free, like all public transport in the country since 2020—, Clervaux is today a perfect getaway that combines three layers of history: the Middle Ages of its castle, the memory of the Battle of the Bulge and the humanist legacy of Edward Steichen. A small village in a deep valley that, thanks to an exhibition of photographs, is in conversation with the whole world.
